


The Circle Game

by backfire



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Gun Violence, Prom, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:21:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26490307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backfire/pseuds/backfire
Summary: Harry generally doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. Hence, how he landed himself in some kind of time loop.But when Allie returns, carrying two shots of whiskey in highball glasses, he still laughs as he watches her shoot hers straight back, and thinks maybe this whole thing with her is a little separate from all that in the first place. Like, he can know what he’s doing with her while simultaneously knowing nothing about anything else.
Relationships: Harry Bingham/Allie Pressman
Comments: 28
Kudos: 69





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i'm a canon-verse supremacist at heart. going back to those roots!
> 
> this was born from an episode 3 rewatch + palm springs on hulu. highly recommend you check it out!
> 
> this is a prom night time loop fix-it. kind of. or is it?

Harry spends the rest of prom in a daze that he can barely understand.

He’s high, but he’s not fucked up, and he wants to be fucked up. But Campbell refuses him another one of those little white pills, so all he can do is drink. The bottle of whiskey he’d taken from Allie is gone, as is she—she’s dancing with Will, spinning around in circles with him, laughing wildly as this slow song plays in the background. Harry doesn’t know what the fuck it is with this guy, why both the girls he kind of wanted to dance with tonight have ended up dancing with Will instead. 

But it’s not like Allie’s his to dance with, and Kelly kind of isn’t anymore either. 

He pours himself another drink, and then another, keeps downing them until the world spins and he can barely see straight.

He goes home alone after half the crowd has dispersed for the night, nearly stumbling into a thicket of shrubs next to the sidewalk in his faded state because he thinks he hears and sees something rustling in the bushes. Like an animal, or something. But then he chalks it up to the high and makes it the rest of the way without eating shit.

All he wants is to be alone, to go to sleep and maybe wake up from this everlasting nightmare, back in the real world. But there are nineteen other people living in his house now, and a few of them plus some others are out back by his pool when he returns, because yeah, why not use his place as the after party venue? It’s not _his_ place anymore. Nothing is just his anymore.

Mickey invites him to join them when Harry passes by, but he barely registers the words, wanting to get out of this suffocating suit, maybe burn this shirt that has a dark stain right on the chest that he never noticed until it was pointed out. 

There’s also something sick that roils in his stomach when he walks past the blue glow of the pool, veering left to go into the house through the sliding glass door. It was less crowded than earlier, before prom, with the random group of guys hanging out like they were friends, or something, despite the fact that Harry’d barely spoken to any of them before, except maybe Jason.

He’s spent nearly the entire evening drunk or high or both, and he tends to say whatever the fuck he wants when he’s like this, but...there’s this weird feeling that he crossed the line, or something. He barely remembers what he said. Just knows it was bad, whatever it was, and it’s making his insides shift uncomfortably right now. Or maybe it’s all the shit in his system.

Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters here, because this _isn’t_ real life, things don’t count here the way they do in the real world. Who cares if he takes too many pills, who cares if he drinks too much, who cares if he says whatever he wants? None of it matters.

He passes out before he can think too much on it, barely having shed his stupid night blue suit jacket, barely having undone his stupid bowtie.

Blissfully alone in his room, he gets his peace and quiet at last and wishes that he could wake up back in a time where things were right.

It’s when he watches Allie break down at the church podium in front of everyone that he gets the feeling this is somehow his fault.

Emily dying was a fluke. Some kind of freak accident out in the woods, something that was nobody’s fault, exactly.

Cassandra dying isn’t like that. Someone _shot_ her, murdered her, and he’s listening to Allie’s voice waver as she demands to know who did it, to no avail. This isn’t nobody’s fault. Someone did this. Someone shot another person, and now Cassandra’s dead, her body wrapped up in a white sheet, laid on the altar before them like some kind of sacrifice.

It’s coming back to him in pieces, what he said by the pool just last night. When things still didn’t matter. He doesn’t recall his exact words, but he does recall wishing out loud Cassandra would die.

And now she’s dead. And Will’s arm is around Allie as she cries, and she’s the last one out the door as Clark and Jason and the others haul Cassandra’s shrouded body out behind the church so they can bury her next to Emily.

Harry puts on his sunglasses before they lower the body in so he doesn’t have to see as clearly. So it all seems a little less real, the world going shady and sepia like that’ll somehow protect him from the truth. Across the grave pit, Allie looks ashen and empty, and the dark of his lenses isn’t enough to prevent him from catching the tear stains down her cheeks, the quiet burning in her eyes as she scatters the first handful of dirt over Cassandra’s body. 

This is a new Allie, compared to the one he’s seen. The one he knows. The one who laughs like a maniac when she’s hit by a car, the one who presses her lips together to show that she’s pleased after being kissed. Just the other night, she looked soft and glittery pink in her prom dress, coming up next to him to pour a shot of whiskey for herself before he gave her his own drink. She’s like a completely different person right now, and he feels even worse.

She clears off before Luke and Clark begin shoveling dirt to fill the grave pit, and Harry wonders how things have gone so wrong. How there’s a killer among them now. How, despite the fact that he _knows_ he went home last night and passed out and woke up alone in the morning, this all feels like it has something to do with him.

Harry realizes—as the grave slowly gets fuller, as the white shroud becomes less and less visible with each new shovelful of dirt, as people begin quietly trailing off, murmuring somberly amongst themselves—that he didn’t mean what he said. It was just an ugly thought.

This helps nothing and no one, but he thinks it anyway.

As he’s leaving, feeling too constricted in his suit that he shouldn’t have put on in the first place, Campbell presses another pill into his hand and tells him it’ll help with whatever he’s feeling. And then he leaves too, until Harry’s alone outside the church, in front of the steeple. He stares at the pill in his palm for a long time before he swallows it, hoping that it’ll get rid of the gnawing of guilt in his stomach.

As far as he knows, he doesn’t have anything to be guilty about. He went home last night, and he sure as shit didn’t shoot anybody. He doesn’t think he’s even capable of that. Was probably asleep when it happened, apparently late at night, after everyone had cleared out and Cassandra was left alone to clean up. But the sensation doesn’t go away, and the pill only serves to make it more intense than anything else, the entire world too bright and too loud once the high hits.

That night, he sits by the pool, which is empty for once, hoping to take the edge off with a drink. Everyone else is shuttered off inside, the mood too bleak for relaxing in the backyard like they had the other night. He’s glad to be alone.

He thinks about last night. Tries to recall, to make the connection between this guilt he can’t seem to shake and whatever went on. He remembers getting mad at one of them talking shit about Kelly, smashing his beer bottle, his insides feeling vicious and raw and, underneath that, angry and a bit lonely. Remembers directing his anger into whatever topic felt easiest, whatever was within reach, which was Cassandra. Remembers some distant part of himself, like an out-of-body apparition, being aware that this was not okay shit to say, but then again, nothing had really mattered at that point. Consequences weren’t a thing yet.

All he knows is that he’d wished Cassandra were dead, and then she died, and Allie had looked so fucking _broken_ up there on that podium and he feels responsible, somehow. For making her look like that, for the body they buried behind the church in the afternoon.

The whiskey in his hand is untouched, because now all he can think about is watching Allie tilt her head back and take a shot, grimacing at the taste as he laughed at her, and how things have gone so wrong from there in such a short span of time. 

The sky above him is scattered with stars and the night is quiet. _Like you wanted,_ his subconscious supplies, but this particular quiet feels wrong. Feels like the means with which he’s gotten it are twisted and not at all what he wanted. He tries to focus on the stars instead, the visuals rather than the sound.

These probably aren’t the same stars he used to count out here with his sister when they were younger—they’re completely unknown. He’s figured out as much from the freak solar eclipse a while ago, just has kept his mouth shut about it because he doesn’t think it’ll help anyone to know.

It’s when he’s staring up at the sky that he catches it: a streak of light travelling across the sky, thin and white and moving fast. A shooting star.

It might be childish, but no one’s around to see. Harry figures if his wishful thinking somehow got them here in the first place, then what has he got to lose by wishing something else?

Head spinning, he closes his eyes and makes the same wish he had last night. Anything to make this guilty feeling go away. Off to the side, there’s another rustle in the trees, but he’s too focused on catching the last of the star to notice.

When he opens his eyes, the star has dipped past the other side of the horizon, and he feels stupid. Like, what is this supposed to accomplish?

Suddenly, an overpowering drowsiness washes over him; he guesses this is the high crashing him out. He doesn’t fight it. He ends up falling asleep there, stretched out on the pool chair, wanting to stop thinking so deeply about everything.

When Harry wakes up, he doesn’t realize right away that something’s amiss. His head is fucking killing him, but that’s not out of the ordinary since he’d been drinking. He’s in his bed, the sheets drawn nearly all the way over his head, the sunlight filtering in through the window behind his headboard, just like always. He hears people puttering around downstairs and is immediately annoyed because he knows there’s not going to be any coffee left.

It registers, though, that this isn’t where he’d fallen asleep last night. The last thing he remembers is making a stupid wish, like a little kid, on a falling star, and then passing out on one of the pool chairs outside. Harry figures he must have gotten up in the middle of the night and trudged inside. In his substance addled state, it’s not the weirdest thing that he can’t remember.

It feels way too early to be awake in comparison to how late it was by the time he’d fallen asleep, but he gets out of bed anyway, pulls on his robe and thanks the fucking Lord that his bedroom has an ensuite. Or else he’d be stuck brushing his teeth in the filthy kitchen sink, like that one kid from yesterday Harry swears he’s never seen before in his entire life.

The Toothbrush Kid is standing in the same spot as had been the morning of prom and gives Harry the same unyielding look he had that morning too, like this is _his_ house and Harry’s the intruder, somehow. He leaves after a moment without saying anything, and Harry shakes his head slightly. He’s mistaking routine for déjà vu. That’s what this weird feeling in his stomach is.

The kitchen, somehow, seems to be just as big of a mess as ever; he’s not sure why he thought the funeral would get people to get their act together, clean up a bit. They’re supposed to go to work today, same as usual, which is absurd to think about. But people need to eat, whether or not Cassandra’s alive, he guesses.

He stands there next to the sink, waffling about what exactly he came down here to do, because he knows there’s no coffee left, or tea, or food because the contents of his fridge and pantry has already been snatched up by the nineteen-person horde and anything remaining has long been ferried to the cafeteria. His feet had just carried him here automatically, by instinct.

Gretchen comes into the kitchen then and stares at Harry. He’s getting pretty tired of people looking at him like he doesn’t belong in his own house. And then she asks, “What are you looking for?” and that’s...familiar, too. The déjà vu is back.

“Coffee,” Harry answers slowly, the word pulled up from the back of his throat somewhere, feeling like it hardly belongs to him. He knows there’s no fucking coffee.

“Good luck with that,” Gretchen scoffs, and then she shoulders past him.

Harry remains standing there. His headache, which had subsided once he splashed some cold water on his face after waking up, returns. He pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to chalk it all up to coincidence, but...it doesn’t feel like that.

It must be, though. Or he’s dreaming. Or he’s still high and is straight up hallucinating, and whatever had been in the pill Campbell slipped him after the funeral yesterday is a lot more potent than the one from prom night.

He goes back upstairs, back to bed, and figures his mind will settle down after some more sleep. But instead of closing his eyes, he lies against the sheets and stares up at the ceiling, wondering if he’s losing his grip on reality already. Maybe because of the drugs. He’s only taken two pills in total, but...maybe it has something more to do with being trapped in this other world for a month now. 

That’s enough to cause anyone to go insane, right?

When Kelly shows up in his doorway and demands he take her to his mom’s bedroom, he knows it’s not just coincidence.

He watches as she digs frantically through the drawer of his mother’s vanity and then unearths a little handheld mirror with her initials engraved on it, part of a set she’s had for as long as Harry can remember, and this has all has happened already. 

Toothbrush Kid staring at him and Gretchen asking what he’s looking for—those things are easy to pass off as coincidences, or perhaps routine, but this? Kelly passing him the mirror and informing him, with an undercurrent of anger in her voice, that his mom was fucking her dad. This is way too specific. This already _happened._

Harry stares at the mirror in his hands blankly, trying to find the words. He didn’t believe it last time, until she passed him the lipstick container and then looked on his mom’s computer. There’s still disbelief in his voice now, though it’s for something else, when he asks her point blank, “Is this a joke?”

If it is, it’s not fucking funny. Maybe he really is hallucinating. Or having a psychotic break, or something. But he does a quick check in of his facilities, and he feels completely normal, physically, other than the dull headache between his eyes. He doesn’t even feel high or anything right now.

Kelly seems to think he’s referring to the situation with their parents, because she hands him the lipstick container from her back pocket, like it’s some kind of totem.

“This isn’t funny,” Harry says, shaking his head. “This makes no sense. What the fuck’s going on?”

“This isn’t a joke,” Kelly snaps. “Do you hear yourself?”

Harry’s about to clarify that that’s not what he means, that’s not what he’s talking about, but that’s when Mickey comes in looking for his shirt, and just like last time, Harry tells him loudly to fuck off, the words coming automatically, on instinct, and the strange pull in his stomach is stronger than ever before.

Kelly’s sitting at his mom’s desk and...Harry feels so frayed around the edges, like he’s losing his grip on reality as he informs Kelly weakly that the password’s still his birthday, because he knows it’s useless to try and get her to focus on anything else while something like this is consuming her.

He reads over her shoulder as she scrolls through their parent’s messages obviously indicating their affair, barely taking the words in. It doesn’t matter, because he’s seen them before. Kelly’s shaking her head as she says something about her mom not even knowing, and Harry’s certain that this isn’t a joke now, because he knows for a fact that Kelly’s not that great of an actor and the hurt and shock in her voice is genuine.

And then she’s pushing the mouse away in disgust and saying, “Fuck, I need to go, I need to get out of here,” shouldering past Harry out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

He doesn’t try to stop her this time, the words caught in his throat somewhere, remembering what she said last time. _There is no us._ It had felt like some kind of truth that he hadn’t been at all ready to face yet; still isn’t quite ready now, to be honest. But he’s also too caught up in this strange fucking repeat to give it too much consideration.

He stands alone in his mother’s bedroom, his head suddenly pounding again, his mind reeling to decipher what the fuck this all means. He comes up empty.

By the time it’s evening and a bunch of guys have congregated outside his pool to drink and fuck around before prom, Harry’s come up with a couple theories.

First and foremost is that he’s having some kind of freaky lucid dream right now, reliving this specific day in his subconscious after the funeral. Second is that he dreamed that entire day and the following day up in the first place, as some kind of premonition or something, and none of that has actually taken place yet because _this_ is the real day. Third goes back to the drugs, and he’s on some kind of really bad, really long trip. Possibly it’s some kind of combination of all three.

(Secretly, Harry thinks the second option is the least likely out of the bunch, weirdly because of Allie. He doesn’t think he’d have a hard time imagining how she might look at prom, in her satiny pink dress, her delicate little earrings, her hair cascading in waves down her back. But he does think he’d never be able to make up the look on her face in the church the next day, the broken hitch in her voice, the disconnectedness of her eyes as they stood across from each other over Cassandra’s shrouded body.)

In any case, he just has to...get through it. Close out the day, go to sleep, and then wake up and have things go back to normal. Carry on with this super fucking depressing reality in which they’ve found themselves.

The guys are hitting golf balls into a floating patch of green in his pool, which, now that he’s not drunk, he thinks is super fucking annoying because no one’s going to go in later to fish out the sunken golf balls. They’re just going to sit at the bottom of the pool forever. Blake or whoever the fuck is complaining about prom, how it’s all a ruse to pretend like things are normal, which Harry sort of agrees with. Though now that he looks back on it, it’s practically the same thing he had done with Fugitive. Prom is basically a more put-together version of that.

“Harry, are you gonna go?” someone asks, and Harry looks over. It’s Dewey, Greg Dewey, this skinny kid who Harry never paid attention to but guesses he now shares a house with.

“Dunno,” Harry answers, and that’s true this time, too. Is there a point? Is it just going to make him feel worse, about all this repeat shit? He already knows what happens: he has a bad time, doesn’t talk to Kelly, doesn’t dance with Allie, leaves by himself, and then someone shoots Cassandra. There’s something inside him that’s pushing him to go, though, like that’s where he’s supposed to be.

The conversation swings over to Kelly, and then Cassandra, and Harry...Harry still doesn’t remember the exact words he said originally, but he says something to the same effect this time. About how Cassandra’s the problem (he still thinks that part’s sort of true), about wishing she’d disappear (that part’s not so true anymore, not _really_ ). The words taste awful in his mouth, and he knows deep down he doesn’t mean them, but this is how it’s supposed to go, right?

He just has to get through it. And no matter what, it feels good to let some of his frustration out into the open. Even if it’s misdirected.

At prom, because of course he winds up going, Harry watches Will hold Kelly close as they dance, feeling a strange sense of detachment from it all. It must come across as sadness or pain or something on his face, because Campbell still offers him the pill, folded up into Mr. Alden Banta’s name card. He accepts it, but leaves it in his pocket. One time-bending drug trip is enough for him, thanks.

He wonders if he should have tried harder to get Allie to dance with him. 

He’s made a drink that he has no plans of consuming; it’s for her, after she downs that shot of straight whiskey. He still laughs at that, possibly the only time he’s smiled all day long, through this weird fucking déjà vu day. And then he asks her to dance, and—the first time, it had felt perfunctory. Like it was just something he was going through the motions of doing. 

This time, he realizes that he kind of actually wants to, because he’s had a hell of a day and she looks so pretty in her pink dress and she’s the only person who’s made him smile in what feels like ages now, and...what would it change, really? Probably nothing, so what’s the harm? Especially if this is all just a dream. Or a bad trip.

She smiles, pleased, the same way she had been when he asked her to be his partner for Fugitive back at the gas station. But then she scans the crowd, gets this sullen look on her face and says it’s simpler in the long run if they don’t, that she’s not in the mood.

Harry doesn’t know how to tell her that things don’t get simpler just because they don’t dance together. In fact, they get infinitely more complicated—for reasons unrelated, but still.

But he lets her go anyway, watches as she melds back into the crowd. Lexie still comes up to him and points out the stain on his shirt, Allie still spins on the dance floor with Will, Kelly still goes through it live on stage in front of everyone. Harry hadn’t been entirely lucid at all for this part in his dream, or the other day, whatever the fuck is happening, but he feels a little bad now. She’s obviously not dealing well with the whole parental affair situation. Harry, like everything else to do with his parents, has already begun the process of repressing the hell out of it.

And he still goes home at the end of the night alone. He doesn’t stumble this time, because he’s kept a clear head all night, afraid to fuck up his system even more. Mickey still invites him to join the rest of them by the pool, Harry still declines and manages to get his suit all the way off this time before falling into bed.

When he wakes up, it’ll be the day of the funeral. And he’ll go through that again, too. Or it’ll be the day after, and he can chalk it up to a bad dream, a bad trip.

Either way, Harry’s beyond glad that the day’s over. He doesn’t want to do it again.

When he wakes up in the morning, his head is fucking killing him, and he curses into his pillow, moving facedown so that he block out some of the sunlight streaming in through the blinds behind his bed frame. He has a feeling he knows where this is going.

Downstairs, Toothbrush Kid still gives him a blank stare, and Gretcen still asks what he’s looking for. Harry doesn’t have an answer this time, and she raises her eyebrows at him and shoulders past him all the same.

He feels like he’s losing his mind.

When Kelly comes over to confirm her discovery about their parents, Harry tries talking to her as she’s digging through his mother’s vanity once again.

“Kelly,” he tries, and she doesn’t look up from the drawer, items clattering inside as she searches for the compact little mirror. “Have you ever had, like, a really bad case of déjà vu?”

“What are you talking about?” she says as she retrieves the mirror, smooths her thumb over his mother’s engraved initials on the front. Then she barrels forward, disregarding his question entirely. “The condoms. They were for my dad. She was fucking my dad.” She looks at him expectantly, like she wants him to be just as pissed and shocked as she is.

He knows this already, though. He still takes the mirror when she hands it to him, but he’s barely thinking about the affair, fails to put on an act. “Or what about, like...you know when you’re a little kid, and you make a birthday wish? Or a wish upon a star? Have any of those ever come true for you?”

She squints at him, something a little like disbelief in her eyes, and then he feels distantly bad once again, remembering how she was on stage in front of everyone, barely holding it together until Gwen came to the rescue. 

“Are you even listening to me? I’m telling you our parents were sleeping together. Your dad and my mom. Do you even care?” She fishes the lipstick case out of her back pocket, hands it over to him like that’s proof enough. It might as well be. Harry already knows what’s on his mom’s computer.

But he can’t even think about that right now. He’s thinking about how if Kelly were going through something similar, she’d be put on alert by his line of questioning. He’s thinking about how he got here, how this is the third time he’s had this same conversation. How he wished on a shooting star like a little kid, feeling desperate and raw, and now his wish has come true, or at least some twisted version of it has. Like yeah, no one’s dead yet, but things aren’t any less wrong, because this entire world is wrong. This whole place.

 _That’s_ what he meant by ‘go back to a time when things were right.’ Not this.

“This is…” He looks down at the engraved silver items in his hands, and then hands them back to Kelly, his mouth dry. “I think you should go,” he says, and she takes the items back, squares her jaw and looks at him before swallowing and nodding. They’ve been off, not on the same page, ever since they got here, Harry realizes. Maybe even before. This seems like it’s for the best.

She leaves quietly this time, doesn’t slam the door behind her, and Harry’s out of the room before Mickey even comes in asking for his shirt.

He retreats to his bedroom and doesn’t come out for the rest of the day, not even when he hears voices gather outside in the backyard, by the pool, guys drinking and hitting golf balls. No, he’s busy thinking.

If this has something to do with his wish, then it has something to do with his feeling of guilt. Which means it also has to do with Cassandra dying. Harry can only assume his goal here is to...stop it from happening, or something. He doesn’t know why the onus has to be on _him_ , because saying he wanted someone dead isn’t the same fucking thing has shooting and killing someone.

Regardless, Harry begins formulating a plan. And if it goes accordingly, he can get the fuck out of this loop or whatever it is, Cassandra will be alive, Allie won’t have that broken look on her face, and things will go right back to the status quo. Which he’s not generally happy with, but at least it’s better than having a fucking funeral the day after prom.

He dresses for prom with a little more care this time, noticing the stain on the shirt in his closet before he puts it on. He chooses a different one, one that’s clean and pressed and crisp, slicks his hair on the sides, straightens his bowtie.

He passes by a couple of guys who are still lounging around by the pool when he leaves. Dewey or someone calls out to him incredulously, “You’re actually going to prom?” and he shrugs, doesn’t answer before he exits the gate.

When he gets there, he sits at the table he usually does, watches Kelly dance with Will, watches Cassandra pose for pictures in the stupid astronaut photobooth. Watches as Allie arrives, late, in her pink dress, going over to a table with some of her friends and immediately beginning to drink. That makes the corner of his lips tug upwards, and he swirls his own drink in his glass, because—well, if this isn’t a bad trip or a dream, then he should be allowed to drink, right? It’s what he’d normally do.

He must not look as upset as he usually does, or something, because Campbell passes by him at some point without so much as a greeting, much less an offer of drugs.

Allie’s dancing on the floor with her friends when Harry gets up and goes over to the bar to begin mixing the gin and tonic that he knows she’ll take after she comes up next to him in just a second. And then she does, the bottom edge of her dress brushing against his knees. Has she always stood so close?

“You came,” she says, pushing her shoulder into his slightly to snatch the bottle of whiskey in front of him, pouring herself a shot into her too-tall glass.

“So did you,” he says, not even bothering to hide the way he eyes her up and down. Look, she’s part of the plan, but she’s still hot. And he still wants to dance with her. And that’s part of the plan, too, but he’s allowed to also enjoy it, okay?

She slides the whiskey down her throat and he laughs; he doesn’t think he’ll ever not laugh at that. How headstrong and unexpected it is, for a girl like her to just take it, barely even flinching afterwards. Not having to immediately reach for a lime to take the edge off the bitterness, the way he had. He gives her his gin and tonic, says it’ll taste better than straight whiskey. She sniffs at it and then sips delicately before turning around to face the dance floor instead of the bar. 

Yeah, this time he’s going to try harder.

Harry turns with her, leans on his elbow against the bar so he’s facing her when he speaks. She looks distracted and unhappy, staring out at the crowd. He asks, “You having a good time?”

She takes another sip of the drink, the ice clinking against the rim of the glass, and then looks at him, considering. “You want the truth? Or isn’t it obvious?”

He laughs a little, then tilts his head to the side. “I hear dancing’s supposed to help with that.”

“Hmm. Tried that. Still not really in the mood. This helps, though.” She gestures with the drink in her hand, then drinks again. It’s half empty by now, and he’s sort of impressed.

“You could try with me.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You asking me? Again?”

He eyes her up and down once more, transparent in the way he checks her out because, if memory serves, she liked when he did it back at the gas station. And if the way her eyes go a little appreciative and warm is anything to go by, her elbow bumping against his at the bar, she likes it now, too. He tilts his chin down, says quietly like it’s some kind of shared secret, “You could be my partner. Again.”

She presses her lips together; she's thinking about it. And this time, when she says, “It’s probably simpler in the long run if we don’t,” she’s suppressing a smile, and her sentence trails off a bit at the end, as if she’s waiting for him to try and convince her otherwise.

He gives her a little shrug, lowers his lashes, and says, “Simple is boring. And I don’t think you’re boring, Allie.”

She blinks at him, opens her mouth, then closes it, and then looks at the ceiling with her tongue poking against the inside of her cheek, and...yeah. In all the whirlwind of the drama and tragedy, Harry sort of forgot that Allie’s prone to saying yes to him. She might be the only one in the whole town who is. He’s still as pleasantly surprised about it as ever, like he’d been in the parking lot the night of Fugitive, seeing her standing there with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, waiting to be his partner.

“You always lay it on so thick for the girls?” she asks as she pushes herself off the bar, leaving the drink behind, then motioning with her head for him to follow her to the dance floor.

He clicks his tongue and says, “Only you would know.”

She bites her lip like she likes that answer, then once they’re in the crowd, takes his hand and starts moving to the music, her cheeks flushed from the drinks she’s had. He takes her other hand and she’s smiling, and so is he, watching as her golden earrings catch in the glittery lights from the fake stars plastered all over the ceiling. He spins her around, and then she faces him and they move in sync and it all feels natural and _fun._

“How about now?” he asks, leaning over close to her ear. “Good time, yet?”

“Better,” she concedes, her eyes sparkling. 

Then Bean switches the song, starts playing something by Aretha Franklin obviously meant for couples. The crowd around them slows down, dwindles to just people who are paired off, holding each other close. Harry thinks about stepping back, maybe giving her some space in case she’s nervous about people (namely Cassandra—she didn’t give a shit about other people during Fugitive) seeing. But Allie just takes his hand and moves it to her waist, against the lace detailing around the middle of her silky pink dress, gets her arms around the back of his neck and moves in closer to him, until their fronts are pressed against each other and they’re swaying softly to the music.

“Now it’s good,” she says, smiling slightly. He exhales, because maybe he hadn’t thought his “plan” through well enough, hadn’t anticipated how good this part would feel. Or maybe this is exactly what he wanted to happen. In any case, she’s entirely distracting. He likes her—has always liked her, but it sort of came back full force after Fugitive, and he’s a little knocked off his feet right now by exactly how _much_ he likes her.

“Glad I could help.”

She blinks up at him and tilts her head to the side, taps her fingers a little against his suit collar and bites the corner of her lip. He wants to kiss her. Maybe he’ll just do it. That’s what he did last time, and she liked it. Enough to ask him inside, even, that intense look in her eye as the thunder rumbled overhead and the air grew thick with the oncoming storm. Then she hesitates slightly and asks, “Why didn’t you ask me to prom?”

Harry opens his mouth slightly, until he realizes he doesn’t have a good answer to that. “Did…you want me to?” he asks slowly, tightening his grip around her waist.

“Kinda, yeah. Yesterday, outside the cafeteria.”

He blinks, thinking back, realizing that interaction was technically just yesterday. For him, it’s been—what, three, four days now? “I…didn’t know if I was coming,” he says honestly, because by then he genuinely hadn’t decided yet. He thought the idea was stupid, especially since it had Cassandra’s name attached to it, even though it was mostly Kelly’s thing. “I should have, though.”

“Neither did I. But I looked at you and told you I never wanted you more,” Allie says wryly, adjusting her arms around his neck. “Thought that was enough of a hint.”

“Thought you were just stating a fact,” Harry responds with a smirk, and she rolls her eyes, leaning into him heavily so he has to support her weight before she sways back into place. “You came anyway, though.”

“And so did you.”

The song changes into something even slower, more mellow, more like background noise that’s easy to use as an excuse to hold her close. He’s glad he hasn’t taken Campbell’s pill. He’s glad he can see this up close, clearly, not through the haze of some high. She’s leaning against him and her hair is around her face in these really pretty ringlets. He’s always thought she was hot, even back in high school, in their old lives, but God—this is something else. Why didn’t he do this the first time?

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry sees Cassandra slow dancing with Gordie; Allie’s back is to them, so she doesn’t catch the little double take Cassandra does when she sees Harry with her sister. And Harry likes Allie independently of how he sees Cassandra, always has, but the contentious asshole in him feels a little vindictive sort of satisfaction at her look of disbelief.

Whatever. He’s basically doing this for her own good anyway.

And then Allie’s leaning up into his ear, her lips brushing against the shell, saying, “Let’s get out of here,” in this low voice that makes his eyebrows raise with intrigue, because it’s _hot._ He looks down at her and wets his lips, and…he really, really wants to say yes. This is the second time _she’s_ initiated doing more, and he’s just as into as he was last time. 

But he’s here to do something, after all. So clears his throat, and asks, “Aren’t you supposed to, like, stay after and help Cassandra clean up?”

He only says it like that because Allie always follows along with whatever Cassandra does—being assistant stage manager because Cassandra’s in theater. Being the debate club notetaker because Cassandra’s the team captain. Showing up at whatever volunteer events Cassandra does; it’s typical that Allie’d stay behind to clean up here, right? 

But then she steps back from him a bit, loosens her arms around his neck slightly, gets this pinched look between her brows. 

“Fuck Cassandra. I’m not _supposed_ to do anything,” she says, a little sharply.

That’s not what Harry’s expecting to hear at all, because for all he knows, the sisters are close. He’s never once seen Allie at odds with Cassandra before. He furrows his brows. “You’re not gonna help her?”

She steps fully away, lets her arms fall from his neck. “What do you care? You hate her.”

He runs his tongue across his teeth, unsure of how to answer. Because yeah, he’s not a fan of Cassandra and everyone knows that, but he also doesn’t want her _dead_ , like actually dead.

But here’s the thing: his plan was sort of to stick with Allie all night. He figured automatically that she’d stay around to help Cassandra with the cleanup, and that this time he would too, under the guise of spending more time with Allie which…is already a thing he’s interested in doing, so it’s not like he’d be pretending, there. And then when the time came for Cassandra to go and take out the trash, he’d suggest they all go together, or something, or maybe redirect them to a different spot or offer to get his car and drive them home. Something like that.

Maybe he hasn’t thought the exact details through enough, but the point is: he needs a reason to stick around after, and he has an in with Allie. And he needs the excuse, he can’t just step in randomly when Cassandra’s attacked, because then the questions come up of why he was there in the first place, how did he know it was going to happen. And knowing Cassandra, she’d find a way to blame him for the entire fucking thing, get him implicated, because everybody knows how they feel about one another. And Harry figures he already has it hard enough without the whole town thinking he orchestrated a fucking hit job on her, too.

But it’s not like he can say any of this to Allie, and he apparently spends too long searching for words, because she gets this closed off look on her face, everything shuttering off behind a veil. She shakes her head and says, with some kind of bitter disappointment, “It’s always about her, somehow. Even with you.”

And he wants to tell her that _no_ , this isn’t about Cassandra—except that it kind of is, just not in the way that Allie’s interpreting. Not in any way that Harry can adequately voice. And that he wants nothing more, really, than to take her up on her offer, maybe drive her around in his car again, maybe kiss her by the pool again, maybe get her in his room again. He would, if he were ignorant about all else that’s supposed to happen. He honestly would.

But then she turns around and leaves, and…yeah, there’s definitely more going on between Allie and Cassandra that might have something to do with this whole thing, but Harry stays rooted to the spot, watching her go. Maybe they can fix it later, if she’s not convinced he’s involved in some kind of elaborate assassination attempt against her sister. Because yes, even though it might implicate him, Harry’s not going to just, like. Let Cassandra get _shot_. 

He sticks around for the rest of the night, brooding silently at the table that he’d been sitting at earlier in the night while others start to trail off.

Campbell passes by and seems to determine Harry looks upset enough now to offer drugs to, folded up into the same paper name card and slid across the table, saying that it’ll numb the pain or whatever. He doesn’t stick around to chat, with Elle waiting for him, and Harry leaves the pill there in between the folded card. Will also passes by, a critical look in his eye when he sees that Harry’s sitting alone.

“Where’s Allie?” he asks, sounding kind of shitty about it. He’d seen them dancing, Harry figures.

“Where’s Kelly?” Harry shoots right back, and Will lets out a breath like he’s annoyed or something, and then continues on without another word. Harry really doesn’t know what all everyone sees in him.

Near the close of the night, Harry goes outside to wait for it to happen. He knows the exact spot, because that’s where they found her, that’s where all the blood seeped into the sidewalk pavement. He feels like a fucking creep as he hops over the ledge that leads out into some bushes and thickets. He also feels highly unprepared—why didn’t he think to bring a weapon of his own? What if the killer is some dude like Jason or something, for whom Harry is obviously no match? Not that Harry necessarily thinks Jason is the murderer type, but then again, what does he know? It could be anyone.

Worst case scenario, though, Cassandra dies, and it actually sticks this time. The days go on like they’re supposed to.

Or Cassandra dies and everything resets, and he does all this again tomorrow, only prepared. Preferably with Allie, so he doesn’t have to hide in the bushes like a weirdo. It sounds shitty, but it’s what he’s working with. Tonight can be dedicated to seeing who the killer actually is, at least. That might make it easier to prevent in the first place, now that he thinks about it. Yeah, okay, this is his new plan. Forgive him for not thinking of it earlier, but this sort of thing isn’t exactly something he has experience with.

Eventually, it grows quiet as everyone else leaves, and then after a while, he hears some movement coming from the doors of the venue. Cassandra steps out, hauling a black trash bag behind her when he peeks quickly over the ledge, covered by darkness. She tosses the bag into the dumpster, and Harry holds his breath, waiting for something to happen.

There’s a rustle in the bushes behind her, and she snaps to attention, likely weirded out by the darkness and the fact that she’s alone, and…Jesus, Harry doesn’t know if he can do this. Just watch someone—even her—get shot. But what is he supposed to do? Jump out and get in the way? Sure, he doesn’t want to see Cassandra dead, but he’s not exactly up for putting himself between her and the barrel of a gun. Not like Allie had, that first night in the church, when Campbell had pulled that revolver on them.

God. Campbell’s probably the one who shot her. It has to be him, right? He already pointed a gun at Cassandra once, even though that time was just for show, or whatever. Harry’s always thought the guy was kind of a weirdo, a loner, but he’s been acting like he’s buddies with Harry ever since they got here and Harry’s just been going along with it. 

But then again, he did see Campbell and Elle leaving together earlier in the night already. Harry has no idea.

He’s still debating between action and observation when Cassandra sighs and shakes her head and then goes back inside. And then comes back out, seconds later, her bag in hand. She shuts off all the outside lights of the building, and then heads in the opposite direction of where her body had been found, towards her house, disappearing into the night, until Harry’s left alone in the bushes.

What the fuck?

He climbs out from the ledge, back out onto the pavement, dusting his pants off. Looks around at the empty parking lot, the dark building, the silent sidewalk. Shines his phone flashlight around, even checks in the bushes and around the corner of the building. He’s alone. There’s no killer here, and Cassandra’s already gone.

Harry has no idea what the hell this is about, no idea what changed, what did or didn’t happen to let Cassandra walk away from tonight without his interference. But he’s not about to argue with it, because this means he gets to wake up with tomorrow actually being tomorrow, right? Cassandra’s alive, which means the problem has been fixed without his help. He can just rest easy and go on dealing with the shitty status quo, pretend like none of this ever happened.

Yeah, that’s the new plan. He’ll deal with tomorrow when tomorrow comes.

Harry wakes up and his head is killing him and it’s too early and his room is too bright and none of this feels like it’s supposed to, because he barely drank last night, but it’s _tomorrow_. It has to be.

He gets out of bed, goes into the bathroom, then pulls on his bathrobe to go downstairs. And when he sees Toothbrush Kid standing there at the kitchen sink, turning to give him the same blank stare he always does, Harry turns right back around and retreats upstairs, climbs back into bed and pulls the covers all the way up over his head. 

He wills himself to fall back asleep out of sheer determination, grasping at some desperate straw that _this_ actually is a dream, or a dream within a dream, this little interlude, because things are meant to be _fixed_. It’s supposed to be over.

When he wakes up again, after an indeterminate amount of time, his head is killing him and the room is too bright, and Toothbrush Kid is at the kitchen sink and Gretchen is asking him what he’s looking for and Harry wants to scream.

This _just_ happened, like ten minutes ago. Before he went back to bed. Is this how this shit is supposed to work? Everything resets if he falls asleep, shoots him back to the morning of prom day?

His head hurts too much right now to think about it, so he groans, gets out of bed, splashes cold water on his face in the bathroom, then dresses in the gray t-shirt he’s worn every day before prom, now clean and folded up in his drawer once again, even though he remembers leaving it draped against his desk chair while changing into his suit yesterday. Then he draws open all the blinds in his room, letting the morning light flood in, hoping maybe it’ll be more conducive to making some sense of all this.

He sits at his desk, thinking back. Tracks the events of the very first day, the only time he managed to go to sleep and wake up the next day, the day of the funeral. And then...he saw the falling star and made his cursed wish and fell asleep almost immediately after, and woke up back in his bed again, back in this same morning. And then every repeat day since then, he’s fallen asleep and woken up right back here. And then this morning—he’d barely been up for twenty minutes before going back to sleep, successfully this time, and then waking up only for it to start all over again.

Okay. So if the loop resets whenever he falls asleep...all he has to do is stay awake, right? And then keep on staying awake. Until tomorrow is _tomorrow_ , until he has proof that time still moves in a linear, forward motion.

Yeah, okay. He’ll stay awake. That part’s easy in theory. But he also has to make sure Cassandra doesn’t die this time, because if she does and he’s still awake, that’s the version of the world that’s going to carry on, right?

Okay. He can do this. He has a better idea now of what needs to be done. It doesn’t have to vary all that much from his plan from yesterday. He still doesn’t know why the killer hadn’t shown up, but he can’t guarantee that’s going to happen again tonight. He just has to make sure. Cassandra goes home alive, Harry stays awake all night, and then things go back to normal. Relatively normal, anyway. As normal as they can be for a fucking alternate universe.

And if, in the process, he could get Allie to not be mad at him by the end of prom, that would be great. He doesn’t know why that part feels just as important as the others, but it does. He decides to start there.

As he’s heading downstairs, he passes by Mickey, who looks like he’s about to say something when he sees Harry.

“Plunger’s in the downstairs bathroom next to the garage,” Harry says preemptively, anticipating the question. He’s _not_ doing that again. “And you left your shirt in the master bedroom.”

Mickey opens his mouth, then closes it, surprised. “Thanks, Harry,” he says, genuinely. Then he shakes his head, laughing a little. “It’s crazy, right? Like, all those years at school and I’ve never been to your house. Now I live here. Isn’t that nuts?”

Harry gives him a thin smile and a pat on the shoulder. Mickey’s the type of guy who’s perpetually upbeat, enough to get on Harry’s nerves by just how positive he is all the time, but…he doesn’t hate the guy. Just thinks he’s annoying as hell sometimes. 

“If Kelly happens to come by later, you can let her in, let her do whatever,” he says, and then moves past Mickey to head for the stairs. He’d left a sticky note on his mom’s computer with the password, in case the engraved mirror isn’t enough for her and she feels the need to look through the messages, too. His presence is pretty much unnecessary, he figures; she hadn’t said all that much to him to begin with. Just sort of came, dumped the discovery on him, and then left.

Downstairs, he passes by the mess in the kitchen and the living room, ignoring the dirty dishes and clothes and chargers everywhere and goes out the front door. Takes the Maserati out, thankful that no one’s thought to take his cars from him to distribute to the masses quite yet, and drives over to the cafeteria where Allie should be wrapping up her shift for lunch prep duty. The Committee let people have the day off today for prom, but they’d been left with a skeleton crew to prepare food for the day. This is the time he caught her yesterday as she was heading out, at least.

She’s yawning as she walks under the awnings over the sidewalk, from the direction of the school, but she smiles when she sees him approaching, just like she had that other day. Yesterday, technically.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she says. She still has her hair net perched on her head, which she seems to realize after she speaks, because she quickly whisks it off and lets her curls fall down her back, around her face. “Thought you had off today. Or were you looking for me?”

She sounds coy. He rubs the back of his head and laughs a little, not wanting to admit that that’s the truth. He’s also, as always, floored by how easily she launches into flirting with him. Like, she’s a fucking natural at it, she’s _good_ at it, which he’s just so into. 

“Just wanted to get out of the house a little. Your shift over?”

“Yeah, I have to go take my nap now,” she says. “Napping every day, remember?”

“Right,” he nods. She doesn’t leave yet, though, still looking at him like she doesn’t want this conversation to be over. He tilts his head to the side. “You want a ride home?” He holds up his car keys. “I drove here. Got sick of walking all over town, you know?”

She blinks at him, a small smile forming at the edges of her lips. Then she glances around, like she’s not supposed to be saying yes. “You sure you don’t have someplace to be?”

That’s not a no. She does this, he’s noticed. Doesn’t outright say no when he asks her things—like playing Fugitive, like dancing with him. Like her first instinct is to say yes, but there’s always something holding her back that she has to fight against before she ultimately gives in, with a little nudge from him. He’s happy to give her that nudge.

He shrugs and says, a bit playfully, “Not anyplace better. What, you don’t like my fast car anymore?”

She presses her lips together and looks to the side, twisting the line of her mouth in a way that tells him she thinks he’s being ridiculous. Maybe he is, but it works; she changes directions and walks towards him, and he falls into step with her as they double back to the parking lot. 

“It’s because I’m tired and it beats walking,” she informs him loftily as she tucks a lock of hair behind her ears.

“Mhm, naturally.”

“And,” she adds as they reach the Maserati and she opens the passenger side door, slides in and then rolls down the window like it’s the most natural thing in the world, “I _do_ like your fast car.”

Harry will never get over just how hot she can get. 

How easily she turns it on, saying shit like that. He’s smiling as he rounds the car to get in the driver’s side, and then he’s revving the engine again, loud and obnoxious in the middle of the day outside the cafeteria like this. Probably everyone inside can tell it’s him, but Allie doesn’t seem to care. He thinks she likes it, leaning one elbow against the ledge of the open window and shaking her head like she’s disappointed, but looking secretly like she thinks it’s hot.

The drive over to her house is a short one, because they’ve pretty much limited all town activities to things that are within walking distance of all the houses people have moved into. But he still likes the way she looks in his passenger seat, her hair blowing in the warm summer wind from the open window. She’s glancing over at him every so often, as if she’s trying to figure him out. And she’s quiet; not like she’d been the night of Fugitive, when she’d been alive and loud as she read him directions and tips from her phone.

When he pulls up to her driveway, she looks over at him, fixes her hair over one shoulder, and says, “Do you wanna come inside?”

Yeah, she needs to…not say shit like that. Harry schools himself for just a second, but she doesn’t even seem to care that she’s being forward. “I thought you were taking a nap?”

She shrugs. “I’m not so tired anymore. And no one’s home. Everyone’s prepping the prom venue or whatever.”

He exhales a single laugh and shakes his head as if to clear his thoughts. He can’t even pretend that it’s not insanely validating, not to mention hot as fuck, that Allie has propositioned him now on multiple occasions, that she wants to sleep with him. Again. Because he is who he is, he knows what it means when a girl asks him inside and also informs him that the house is empty. If this were the real world, he’d be taking her up on it immediately.

But this isn’t, this is still a fucking loop that he’s trying to end, and he doesn’t think he can afford that big of a distraction—and it would be a _big_ distraction. Not to mention it’d feel a little bit like taking advantage, and that’s not what he’s trying to do.

“I’ll come in,” he tries, “but only if you guys have coffee. And food? I never actually ate at the cafeteria.”

She raises her eyebrows a little, maybe surprised he’s not taking her up on it, and then it shifts into a smile, like she’s not unhappy with this option, either. She unbuckles her seatbelt and says, “Yeah, okay. I’ll make you lunch.”

He’s never been inside the Pressmans’ house before, but it’s a lot cleaner than his. The kitchen is a little cluttered, but just in the way that looks lived-in, not anything like the mess at his place.

“How many people are bunking here?” he asks, mostly out of curiosity as Allie leads him inside and gestures for him to take a seat at the island.

“Six, I think? We’re almost never all home at the same time, though,” she says, opening the freezer and getting out a bag of sliced bread. “Why, how many are at yours?”

“Nineteen. Twenty, including me.”

She blows out a surprised breath. “Wow. What the fuck? How’d that happen?”

“You tell me,” he says, squinting. She purses her lips together, then twists them to the side of her face.

“I wouldn’t exactly know,” she replies, sounding a little bitter. “I’m not on the Committee. But if you ask me, that doesn’t sound very fucking fair. Your house isn’t _that_ much bigger than some other people’s. Like, have you seen Gwen’s place?”

“Wait. You’re not on the Committee?” This is news to him. He hadn’t bothered reading the bulletin board with the posting when it first went up.

Allie shrugs, trying to seem nonchalant, but Harry thinks it actually really bothers her, by the way her shoulders are tense, how she reaches up to play with the edge of her ear, her eyes averted. It would bother him too. Especially when he thinks about how Cassandra asked _him_ to join the Committee, that day outside the church. And then she left her own sister off? What the fuck is up with that?

“That’s kinda fucked up,” he says, and she shrugs again, a bit like she agrees, but doesn’t want to talk about it. Harry figures this is it: the thing that’s up between Allie and Cassandra that has her pissed enough to blow off helping clean up after prom.

“You okay with PB and J?” she asks, switching the topic as she pulls the jars out of the pantry. “It’s like our staple around here, kind of the main thing we go for with our rations.” She also sets about putting on a pot of coffee, which Harry is insanely grateful for. He last had coffee before his house got taken over, but he honestly can’t remember the last time he had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Maybe when he was in elementary school and it was the easiest thing for his mom to throw into his lunchbox, before she figured out she could just give him money to buy lunch.

“That’s fine.” He smiles as he watches her work, setting four slices of frozen bread into the toaster, then pressing the button to start the coffee machine. The kitchen starts to smell like the stuff, and he inhales deeply, taking it in. “God. Dunno the last time I had coffee at my place.”

“Not enough to go around for nineteen people, huh? Must be rough.” She spreads some peanut butter on two pieces of fresh toast, then sticks the knife in her mouth, licking the excess off while she gets a clean utensil for the jelly. He laughs a little at the sight of the silver butter knife hanging out of her mouth before she sets it into the sink with a clatter and finishes making the sandwich, using the designated jelly knife to cut it in half diagonally before sliding his over on a plate to him.

“Dressing up just for me. Cooking just for me. What’s next?” he says as he picks up a triangle and bites into it. It tastes like childhood, like nostalgia, all those packed lunches he’s completely forgotten about until now.

“Why does it always have to be me?” she answers, kittenish, as she pours him a fresh mug of coffee. “Maybe it’s your turn to do something just for me.” She slides the mug over to him across the kitchen island, then leans on her elbows against the granite smiles at him, bites into her own sandwich half.

He sips at the coffee, not caring that he’s burning his tongue, too fixated on the way her eyes are playful. He kind of gets what she’s asking, here. He remembers the conversation they had in the last loop, as she was dancing with him. He sets the mug down, then leans back in his seat and looks at her appraisingly. Tries to sound casual when he says, “Are you going to prom tonight?”

She wets her bottom lip, then bites it like she’s trying to hide a smile. Like she’s won by having him bring it up first. And then the satisfied look in her eye dims a little, probably as she considers the implications. “I don’t know,” she answers slowly. “Are you?”

“Thinking about it,” he says, then takes another drink of coffee. He’s going to need the caffeine, if he’s meant to stay up. “There’s one person I kinda want to go with.”

A smile spreads across her face, and he’s never going to stop being charmed by her. “Oh, really.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “Yeah.”

She gets this look on her face that he really likes, half bashful, half coquettish. “Am I the person you asked first?”

He laughs, remembering their conversation at the gas station, also at the way she’s just assuming it’s her. She’s not wrong. 

“You are,” he confirms, and she hides exactly how pleased she is once again. He kind of wishes she’d just show it. Then she gets that conflicted furrow in her brow as she looks around the kitchen, sees some of Cassandra’s things scattered around.

“People are gonna say shit,” she says, and once again—it’s not a no.

“I don’t care,” Harry laughs, because he really doesn’t. And he doesn’t think Allie does, either. She just cares about one person.

“Cassandra’s not going to be happy with me.”

Harry shrugs. “Who gives a fuck what Cassandra thinks?”

Okay, he’s leveraging the fact that he knows she’s mad at Cassandra, because that feels like something that might piss her off any other time. _”You can’t be an asshole to my sister and then nice to me”_ Isn’t that what she had said?

But Allie seems to like that answer, because she laughs, like actually laughs, as if it’s startled out of her. And then, just as suddenly, she shakes her head, pokes her tongue against her cheek, and says in sort of a sad, quiet voice, “I do. Even when I don’t want to.”

He considers his next words carefully before he says them. If this were any other moment, he’d tell her to fuck it, to just do whatever she wants. But something in him unravels a little bit when he realizes that, in the original chain of events, Allie had been fighting with Cassandra when she died. He remembers the look on her face at the funeral, the stilted way she tried to deliver the eulogy before ultimately breaking down. 

“I think that,” he says, “you’re fully capable of making your own decisions, and she should respect them. And that it’s fucked up that she left you off the Committee. You should talk to her about that.”

She looks at him over her sandwich, a little surprised at his insight. She pushes her crusts around on her plate a little, seems to really consider his advice. It must be surprising to hear, coming from him, knowing what he thinks about Cassandra. He doesn’t really hate her anymore, not in the way he had those first few days; even then it was mostly because she was the easiest thing to latch onto, and he wasn’t really happy with how she just...decided to take charge. 

“Since when have you been so wise?”

“Call it a reality check, I guess.” Harry shrugs, takes another bite of his PB&J. “Had to realize some harsh truths lately, with everything in this fucked up situation.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s enough to force anyone to reevaluate,” she allows. “I’m still not over the fact that we’re in, like, another world.”

That, amongst other things. A time loop. Harry’s still not sure what the rules are—he’s figured out that it resets if he falls asleep, but he doesn’t know if all the previous events are erased, if this is a completely new Allie than the one he danced with yesterday, if there are infinite multiverses being created off a single branch each time he opens his eyes in the morning, or if it’s all just one big circle with no beginning and no end. It hurts to think about.

“Tell me about it,” he says simply, unable to get into it. He wonders if Allie would think he’s absolutely crazy if he were to tell her about what he’s going through. He hasn’t tried yet, with anyone other than that futile line of questioning with Kelly. He also isn’t keen to, because this feels like a personal thing. He made the wish, so he’s the one who has to find his own way out.

She regards him for a moment across the island, then glances at the clock on the wall. “You should go,” she sighs. “People are gonna be home soon. Let’s not shock them before they’re ready.”

He takes that to mean her answer is yes, and drains the last of his coffee before standing. “I’ll pick you up at seven?”

Her eyes are sparkling when she nods, and then adds, “My dress is pink, by the way.”

He knows, but she’s not supposed to know that. “Noted. Corsage?”

She shrugs, but Harry can tell she wants one. “Cassandra thinks they’re tacky, but…I think tacky can be kind of nice.”

“Me too,” he says, and then she presses her lips together, hiding her smile once again.

Harry trades out his white pocket square for a pale pink one that he thinks will match Allie’s dress.

He also doesn’t know where he’s supposed to get a corsage in town, like an actual one with ribbons and an elastic for her wrist and baby’s breath and all that shit, but he does clip some of the pink roses from the bushes on his house’s landscaping, the ones that are starting to wilt anyway from lack of care now that they don’t have a gardener to come around and tend to them three times a week. He snips off the thorns, sets one in his breast pocket against the cloth square, and holds the other single rose, one of the only ones that hadn’t basically shriveled up by now, in his hands.

“You’re actually going to prom?” Dewey asks incredulously when Harry passes by the guys in his backyard, the night around them dark and humid. 

“Yeah,” he answers evenly, as the other guys start to make some noise like they want to give him shit. “Yeah, I am.”

“Fuck yeah, man!” Jason says, shouldering his way past the others and motioning to give Harry a high five. “The rest of you are just jealous cause you ain’t got dates!”

“You and Kelly get back together, or something?” Blake asks, looking at the rose in Harry’s hand.

He shakes his head. “Nah, we’re done. I’m taking Allie Pressman.”

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Jason says, knocking him on the shoulder, though he sounds kind of delighted. The way he is about basically everything, like a big puppy dog. Yeah, this guy’s definitely not the murderer. “Okay, I see you. I remember, you guys were hanging out the night of Fugitive. She was pretty crazy, then. Never thought she had it in her.”

“Are you serious?” Blake scoffs, and Harry really does not like his tone. “You’re taking Cassandra Junior?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Harry snaps, though he doesn’t have a beer bottle in his hands this time to smash. Just the rose, which he needs to be careful with so it doesn’t come apart. “She’s not Cassandra. She’s her own person.”

“Okay, I get it, you’re doing this to mess with Cassandra, right? Fuck her sister to make her mad, right?”

Harry sighs heavily and pinches the bridge of his nose. He really doesn’t like these guys. He really doesn’t feel like explaining himself, either, so he just says, pissed off, _“No.”_

“Like I said, man,” Jasons says, putting one arm around Harry’s shoulder and using his other hand to slap against his chest. “Jealous cause they ain’t got dates.”

“Right,” Harry says, even though he doesn’t think that’s exactly the case. He’s going to be late if he sticks around any longer, though, and then Erika shows up to come and get Jason, so he uses that as his opportunity to split. 

He lays Allie’s rose across the passenger seat of his car as he drives over. The sidewalks are lined with people in their fancy dresses and suits walking over to the venue, originally meant to be some kid’s Bar Mitzvah or something.

Allie’s house is quiet, all the lights off except at the porch and through living room window, and she must see his car pull up into the driveway, because before he gets a chance to get out and go up to the front to ring the bell, she’s stepping outside and shutting the door quietly behind her. Her hair’s curlier than it was when he saw it earlier, falling in these pretty waves around her face and shoulders, like she’s done it up a little more. He crosses his arms when he gets out of the car and leans against the side mirror, smiling, and yes, he does check her out, because that’s just what he does.

“You clean up nice,” he says, and she tucks some hair prettily behind her ears, also eyes _him_ up and down, which…he knows he looks good, okay. He’s aware. But to see her doing it right back always makes something like want bloom in his stomach.

“So do you,” she says. “I like the details.” She brings her hand up, brushes it against his pink pocket square. “Very appropriate.”

He holds out the single rose, matching with the smaller one in his breast pocket. “Couldn’t figure out where to get a real one of these things, but. As promised.”

She looks really happy as she takes the flower from him, happy in a different way than he’s seen her before. It makes him feel, weirdly, like things are going to be okay. Like he’s doing the right thing, is on the right track now. 

Then she holds up a finger and says, “Not to worry. I came prepared.” She pulls off a little elastic hair tie she has from around her wrist, loops the flower stem around it a couple times, and then slides it back on. It’s a little lopsided, but it does the job, he supposes. “There,” she says, brandishing her hand out to him. “A little janky, but. It’s still cute.”

“You’re cute,” he says, taking her hand, and she blushes a pink that matches her dress, reflected in the incandescent glow of her driveway lights. This feels tame, somehow, compared to how they usually flirt, but he likes it just as much. “Anyone else need a ride?” Not that he really wants anyone else tagging along inside the car with him and Allie, but it feels rude not to ask.

She shakes her head. “No, they all went already. It’s just us.” Okay, he likes the sound of that. And then she fidgets a little with her hands, shifts her weight around on either foot and adds, “I told Cassandra you were taking me to prom.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I kind of told her…everything about us. Like, about Fugitive and stuff. That night.”

Harry feels his brows raise. “Huh. And how’d she take that?”

“She wasn’t thrilled, but. Now she knows.” She looks at him a little nervously, bites the corner of her lip. “Is that okay?”

“Why wouldn’t that be okay?”

“I don’t know,” she sighs, bringing one hand up to play with one of her earrings. “You two just…everyone knows how you are. I thought maybe you’d want to keep it a secret, or something.”

Harry laughs a little. “I’m not trying to keep you a secret, Allie. I thought that was obvious.”

She looks...satisfied, as she tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “I know. I just second-guess myself a lot.”

“Well, you shouldn’t.”

Allie smiles, and swings around to the passenger side door of the car and gets in. He kind of can’t stop looking at her out of the corner of her eye the drive over—she just looks so good, all dolled up, against the black leather interior of his car. She still seems contemplative, though, and when they’re almost there, she turns to him. “I also talked to her about the Committee thing.”

“Yeah? How’d that go?”

She sighs upwards, a puff of hair blowing some of her hair away from her face. “Well, I’m still mad at her. But…less than before. We’ll be okay, though. We just need to talk about it more.”

“That’s good,” he nods. This bodes well for him, generally. He doesn’t know why he’s taken it upon himself to try and patch up their relationship, or at least gently nudge them into doing it themselves, but it feels important.

“Thank you,” she adds, her voice genuine. “For telling me to talk to her. Even though I know you don’t like her.”

“Yeah, of course,” Harry says, looking over at her. “She’s your sister.”

She smiles at him all soft, also with something like appreciation in her eyes.

He pulls them into the parking lot; they’re one of the only people who have driven here, everyone else coming on foot, likely to accommodate for all the drinking they’re planning on doing tonight. Harry knows he won’t be able to do that, not least of all because he has, what, another 28 hours to go before he’s allowed to fall asleep? He’s definitely going to need more coffee from somewhere. 

Before he gets out, though, Allie lays a hand on his arm and gives him this kind of serious look.

“Harry,” she says, and her voice makes him attention. “Before we go in, I kind of need to know what your deal is, here.”

He feels a confused divot form between his eyebrows. “My deal?”

She blinks at him, and unbuckles her seatbelt to turn more fully to him in the passenger seat. “I know we’ve been flirting. And we slept together the night of your party. And that I kind of propositioned you earlier today,” she says.

“…Yeah,” he says slowly, not sure where she’s going with this.

“And I’m not trying to be, like, precious about any of that. It just is what it is. But then you asked me to prom.”

“Didn’t you want me to?” he asks, confused.

“I did,” she says, nodding. “But I also would have been okay if you didn’t, you know?” He’s not upset by this, because he knows it’s true—she would have shown up to prom all the same, in her pink dress, come up to him at the bar and taken his drink. Propositioned him _again_ , if he played his cards right and got her to dance with him. “But then you did. And then I told Cassandra about us.”

“Yeah, Allie,” he replies. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” she says, clearly, like she really wants him to understand this. “That I’m not just fucking around anymore. And I want to know that you’re not, too.”

His confusion recedes, and he lets this slow grin spread across his face, while she continues to look at him all serious. The corner of her lips twitch, though, and her shoulders get a little more relaxed, her eyes warmer. 

“I’m not fucking around,” he informs her, and then she smiles, too.

“Well. Good,” she says shortly, turning back to face the front and to adjust the strap of her heel before getting out of the car. He can tell she’s happy with the answer, though. 

And here’s the thing: he’s not. This entire day—this is the version of the world that’s going to stick, after he stays up for however long. The one that’s going to carry over into the future. And he wants that one to include him having taken Allie to prom. Wants them to continue this thing after, too, because he just…likes her. Why not kill two birds with one stone, right? Cassandra’s alive, Allie’s sort of with him, or at least that’s the direction they’re heading in, and that’s just how things will be from now on.

“I like this Allie,” he says as he opens the car door for her and offers his hand to let her out. “The one who just says what’s on her mind.”

“Me too,” she says, and then links their arms together so they can walk into prom like that.

He likes dancing with Allie. She’s vibrant and bright on the floor, pulling him along, moving with him. Kelly stares a little, as does Will, as do a few others, when they catch Harry and Allie together, but it doesn’t seem like Allie cares, so he also tries not to care. The one person whose thoughts she cares about already knows, and she and Cassandra seem to have reached some kind of tenuous peace about it, because Cassandra gives them a little nod from next to the photobooths after she sees them on the dance floor.

He shouldn’t be surprised when she comes up to him while Allie breaks to get drinks for both of them. Her arms are crossed and she’s got a sort of expectant look on her face, like she wants him to talk first.

“You look nice,” Harry says, because it’s the polite thing to say, and she just blinks, like she doesn’t care what he thinks of how she looks. He notices a scar in the center of her chest and decides not to comment. “Is this the part where you play the overprotective sibling, or something?”

“Or something,” she says mildly. “We had a talk this afternoon. I don’t know if that was your doing, but…Allie’s usually not so forthcoming, unless she’s really mad. It was good.”

Harry kind of wants to say something about how maybe Allie is withholding because Cassandra makes her feel like she’s not valued in the first place, so why bother? But he holds his tongue. 

“Okay,” he says slowly, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s the one who suggested they talk. It also feels exceedingly strange to be talking to Cassandra in the first place. He can’t remember the last time they spoke, at this point. The last time he saw her, he was expecting her to get shot. And then before that, they were lowering her body into a grave.

“Just,” Cassandra says, looking at him a little critically. She doesn’t say outright that she doesn’t enjoy the two of them together, because she must realize that’s not her decision to make. But he can tell she’s thinking it. “Make sure you know what you’re doing, please.”

She leaves before Allie gets back, and Harry thinks…yeah, he generally _doesn’t_ know what the fuck he’s doing. Hence, how he landed himself in some kind of time loop. So that’s not great.

But when Allie returns, carrying two shots of whiskey in highball glasses, he still laughs as he watches her shoot hers straight back, and thinks maybe this whole thing with her is a little separate from all that in the first place. Like, he can know what he’s doing with her while simultaneously knowing nothing about anything else.

He still makes her a gin and tonic instead that she takes, gratefully this time. Campbell doesn’t come up to him all night, and Allie leads him by the hand back to the dance floor when Natural Woman by Aretha Franklin starts playing. Loops her arms around his neck, looks up at his face like she likes what she sees.

“Having a good time?” he asks, because he can’t help himself.

Instead of answering all coy, though, she gives him this winning smile and nods. “Yeah. You know, before today, I was ready to have a shit time at this thing. What with Cassandra and Will curving me and everything…”

“Will?” Harry asks, because…he’s never once seen Will show an ounce of interest towards Allie. Too busy trying to get Kelly’s attention, in his opinion, even while he and Kelly were together, which Harry always thought made Will kind of an asshole.

Allie shrugs a shoulder.“I haven’t thought about it all night, to be honest.” She trails off, looking to the side. “I thought I liked him, but now it’s…”

Harry likes to think that’s because of him. He lifts the corner of his lips. “And you don’t anymore?”

She shakes her head, hums a no, winds her arms a little closer around his neck. “What about you and Kelly? She seems to have it kind of rough.”

She’s referring to how Kelly had gotten on stage earlier in the night and delivered her huge bummer of a speech about how this prom was a goodbye to their old lives, their childhoods, because nothing was ever going back to normal, before Gwen took her away. 

“She…,” Harry begins, unsure of how to say it to Allie. “It’s been over between us for a while, but she’s kind of going through something. She found out something about her parents over here,” he says, deciding he can tell her this much. “So it’s nothing to do with me.”

Allie nods. “Yeah, I mean. I kind of figured as much when you kissed me at your party. I know I said it already, but like, what was that?”

Harry ducks his head down, smiling. “I just…I wanted to do it.”

“I know,” she says, her eyes glimmering. “I liked it.”

His eyes drop down to her lips, and…he wants to do it again, if he’s being honest. She looks like she kind of wants him to as well. And then she leans up close to his ear again, says in this low voice, “Is it bad that I want to get out of here?”

“No,” he replies automatically, his voice dropping to match hers. He presses his hands a little more firmly against her lower back. “No, it’s not bad.”

“I kind of promised I would help Cassandra clean up, when we talked earlier,” she says, sounding regretful about it. Like she’d rather be leaving to go home with him. “Maybe I should ditch her.”

God, it’s tempting. It’s really fucking tempting—he could tell her yes, ditch Cassandra, come back to his place instead. And the way she looks right now, she’d probably go along with it. But he presses his lips together, pretending to consider. 

“How’s this,” he offers. “I’ll stick around and help you two clean up. And then I can give you both a ride home afterwards.”

“That’s—surprisingly sweet,” she says, drawing back slightly, her face transforming from surprised to something softer. He’s not known for being a particularly considerate person, he’ll give her that much. “You don’t have to do that.”

Harry shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he assures her. “I don’t mind. Plus this way I get to spend a little longer with you.”

She rubs her lips together, and her eyes stay concentrated on his face. He can tell she likes his answer. “Yeah, okay. Yeah, we can do that.”

He’s sweeping confetti off the dance floor and Allie’s sorting through the music equipment, winding up all the wires for the microphones and the turntable when he catches Cassandra tossing the last of the empty beer bottles into a black trash bag. He goes over to her, tries taking the bag from her hands.

“Here, I got it,” he says, and she moves away from him automatically.

“I think I can handle it,” she replies, and he sighs, because this is so not what that’s about.

“It’s a gesture, Cassandra,” he says, trying to play that angle. “Will you just take it?”

She raises her eyebrows, but then hands him the bag. “You don’t get brownie points this way, but whatever.”

‘But whatever’ is right. The important thing is she’s turning away to go and push in some of the chairs around the tables and that leaves him free to duck behind the bar and grab a knife they were using to slice lemons and limes for their drinks and keeps it in his grip, hidden behind the black trash bag, just in case. Not that he can predict if anyone’s going to be out there.

When he steps outside, he clears his throat, so anyone who might be there will know it’s him, not Cassandra. Because what he does know is that whoever did it targeted Cassandra specifically, waited until she was alone and vulnerable and then didn’t go after other stragglers in the night. He keeps his phone flashlight on, hauls the bag into the dumpster, and then checks the bushes and around the corner for anybody, just like he had last night.

As he’d thought, nobody’s there. It feels stupid to be holding a knife in his hand now, so he also leaves that in the dumpster, and then goes back inside.

The lights in the foyer are on, but it’s dark inside the main banquet area, except for the bluish glow of a movie or something, flashing against the carpet every so often with colors, music playing in the background. When Harry goes in to investigate, Allie and Cassandra are standing, watching a home video on the big projector screen up on the stage. Flashes of some kid’s life—the kid who was supposed to have his Bar Mitzvah here—fly by on the screen as this Joni Mitchell song ( _yesterday, a child came out to wonder..._ ) plays through the speakers all around the room.

Allie’s leaning into Cassandra’s shoulder, and Cassandra has her arm around Allie as they silently watch the kid—his name is Bobby, Harry gleans from the home video—grow up, blow out birthday candles, smile goofily into the camera, surrounded by his family and loved ones as the song’s melody goes on ( _fearful when the sky was full of thunder, and tearful at the falling of a star..._ ).

They may still be fighting, but this ought to be enough to make anyone nostalgic for their family, he figures.

Harry stops paying so much attention to the video when Allie turns around and notices him there, standing behind the two of them with his hands in his pockets. She gives him a little smile, the video in the background washing her in transient, shifting colors, moving against her hair, her skin, her dress. She looks unreal.

Inexplicably, he feels this nervous energy start to ball up in his stomach, but he doesn’t know why. Like, things are going _right_. There’s no shooter outside. Allie and Cassandra are patching things up. Allie’s smiling at him. The video goes on, Bobby continues to grow up, the song continues to play, acoustic and soft ( _we’re captive on the carousel of time, we can’t return we can only look behind from where we came..._ ).

Then even Cassandra seems to decide this is too morbid and on the nose for them, because she presses a button on a remote and the video stops. The lights come on, and Harry clears his throat.

Both she and Allie are a little tearful and sad when they turn around, and Harry thinks it’s because they miss their parents. Their families. He feels a little bit like an outsider when they pass him and shut the lights off again, also feels another twist in his stomach like guilt when he thinks about Allie up at that podium, compared to how she is now. How she’d been resting her head against Cassandra’s shoulder, watching Bobby’s video.

Then Allie turns, gestures with her head to him and says, “You coming?”

He laughs a little, mostly at himself. “Yeah.”

Cassandra sits in the back when Harry drives them home, and the three of them are quiet. Allie’s looking down at her lap with a small smile on her face, like she’s happy with the way the night has turned out. Harry is, too. He just wishes he could get rid of the knot in his stomach, the one that feels like a premonition. He keeps telling himself firmly, as he drives, that this is it. This is one night down, and once he stays awake and makes it to the next one, things will right themselves.

“Thanks, Harry,” Cassandra says when he puts the car into park on the Pressmans’ driveway. She sounds like she really means it, though she doesn’t offer anything else before she’s getting out of the car, giving Allie a look that he thinks is meant to mean something between them as she does so. The weird guilt returns when she thanks him, and Harry has to tell himself to let go of the steering wheel as Allie unbuckles her seatbelt.

“Hey,” he says to her, and she smiles at him a little. Like she’s waiting, or something. “Could you do me a really huge favor?”

“What’s up?”

He laughs, wondering if this sounds stupid. It _is_ stupid, but he also really needs it, so. “Could you, like…give me some coffee? Like, a bag of grounds, or beans, whatever you have.”

She parts her lips like she’s surprised, like this isn’t what she’d been expecting, and then laughs. “Yeah, sure. Didn’t know you were such a caffeine fiend.”

“Nineteen people,” he reminds her, and she nods and tells him she’ll be right out in a sec. 

When he’s alone in the car, he presses the heels of his hands against the sockets of his eyes until he sees sparks that, if he tries hard enough, he can pretend are stars. Everything’s going right, he tells himself. Everything is the way it’s supposed to be—better, even, because of how he’s played his cards. 

So why does he still have this feeling in his stomach?

He sits up before Allie comes back, rolls down his window so she can hand him a bag of coffee grounds that he recognizes is from the local place in town. 

“You’re a lifesaver,” he tells her, and she smiles, tucks a lock of hair behind her ears as she leans down to peer at him. Her little earrings hang next to her face, catching the light coming from the driveway, and he looks at them and thinks about falling stars.

“I had a really good time tonight,” she tells him, resting her elbow against the ledge of his rolled down window. He wonders if he should have gotten out of the car for this part, but she doesn’t seem bothered.

“Because of me, I know,” he says, and she rolls her eyes but doesn’t deny it. Then he exhales, braces one elbow next to hers against the open window, and adds, “Me too.”

She leans in first to kiss him, brings one hand up to hold it against the side of his face, and he closes his eyes. Kisses back and lets himself pretend that this is the only version of the world that has ever happened, that none of the other stuff counts or matters. It’s sweet, and she has a bright look in her eye when she draws back, stands up straight and laces her arms behind her back like she’s preventing herself from using them, or something. He’s smiling and he knows it, and this has distracted him entirely from the weird feeling in his gut.

“Night, Harry,” she says. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” She sounds hopeful about it, and God, he likes her. A lot.

“Yeah. See you tomorrow.”

The first thing he does when he gets home is ignore Mickey’s invitation to hang with the people out by his pool. Then he makes himself an entire pot of coffee and takes it with him to his room.

He can do this. He’s not really even tired. He’s sort of thinking about Allie instead, the little noise she made in the back of her throat when he kissed her back. How she pressed her lips together and looked upwards, pleased, when she drew away, just like she had by his pool that night. He’s thinking about how much he likes that look on her.

He downs a cup of coffee, for good measure. He’s not sure exactly how long he needs to stay up for, but he figures after _tomorrow_ turns into the day after tomorrow feels like a good point. It’s already past midnight now, which is a huge relief, shows him that time does, in fact, still move in a linear fashion. The clock doesn’t just reset itself once 11:59PM passes.

He watches a movie. Two movies. Downs another cup of coffee when the sun starts to come in through the blinds in his room, then he draws them all the way up so that the whole room can be light. It’s _working_. The sun is rising and it’s a new day and none of this has ever happened before, because when he goes downstairs to take stock, the kitchen looks different. Messier, somehow, but different. More plates in the sink, another laptop left open on the counter. Toothbrush Kid isn’t standing at the kitchen sink, and people aren’t up yet because everyone’s still passed out from prom, probably. 

It’s fucking _working._ He’s actually doing it.

He goes out for a run after the sun is in the sky, figuring the exercise endorphins will help keep him awake, even though he’s not really tired yet. Takes a shower afterwards, and then thinks about when it would be appropriate to go and see Allie. Or maybe have her come and see him. They didn’t specify the details, just confirmed that they wanted to see each other today. He assumes she has cafeteria duty again; he does too, only the shift after her. Maybe they can see each other after work.

It’s almost noon at this point and he’s, miraculously, still not tired, and he’s about to say fuck it and just text Allie, not caring if it’ll make him come across as overeager or whatever. He wants to see her. This is a _new_ day and he wants to see her.

Then, before he can get her number pulled up, he gets a message from one of those town-wide group threads that they use to make announcements, the ones with way too many people in them to keep track of who’s who. 

It’s telling everybody to come to the church ASAP.

The feeling that he’d forgotten about the moment Allie kissed him is back, rearing its ugly head. His stomach plummets.

He thinks he can guess what the next message is going to say before the three dots turn into words, and he hates it when he’s right.

Cassandra’s dead.

It’s a new day, and Cassandra’s dead.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She seems to be done with imagining this other reality where they go to prom together. 
> 
> (Harry doesn’t have to just imagine, which makes it even harder—he knows how it goes. Knows how she kisses him, dances with him, tells him she had a good time.)
> 
> Her eyes and her smile fade and then she’s just back to looking kind of down, like her whole night’s been a waste.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm so delinquent on this...i really didn't mean to leave this un-updated for a whole month but. life comes at ya!

In the church, Harry finds out someone jumped Cassandra as she was walking in the morning to go to the Committee chambers at town hall.

Everyone in the neighborhood heard the gunshots, though no one saw who did it. Allie had been the one to find her, facedown on the sidewalk just a few blocks from their house, two bullets in her stomach.

It’s also Allie who he sees now at the front of the church, standing level and facing everyone, not at the podium Helena uses to deliver her sermons, not the one Allie’d used originally for Cassandra’s eulogy, when this was a whole formal funeral thing instead of what it is now. Which is Cassandra’s body, laid bare on the altar just like Emily’s had been that first night, shirt bloodied and gunshot wounds visible, not even a sheet to cover her up. Her eyes are closed, and sickeningly, Harry wonders if she died like that or if someone had to close them.

“Who did this?” Allie demands of the crowd. A lot of people are crying, but no one answers, just like last time. “Who _shot_ my sister? _Why did you do that?_ ”

Harry feels like he’s going to be sick. He’s in the back, and no one notices when he slips out the door, stumbles down the stairs, and collapses downwards so he’s sitting on the grass, his head between his knees, heaving these deep, shuddering breaths. His hands are in his hair, and he’s shaking his head. This _isn’t_ how it’s supposed to happen. He got both Cassandra and Allie home last night. There was no killer waiting in the bushes. He stayed up, and time passed normally, and it’s a brand new day now, which is how it _should_ be, only Cassandra’s not supposed to be fucking dead and Allie’s not supposed to be up at the church, looking like she’s breaking into a million pieces.

Bile rises in his throat, and he dry heaves some more before he finally feels collected enough to get to his feet. People are starting to trickle out of the church doors, and he has no idea what went down inside after he left, but Allie doesn’t come out. He can’t bear to face her right now, can’t even imagine it, because this all somehow feels like his _fault_ all over again. Less of the weird guilt he’d felt the first time Cassandra died, and more like...the weight of _responsibility_ because it’s the one job he kind of figured out he has here, and he’d neglected to do it.

How could he have known, though? _How_ could he have?

Campbell must see him looking ashen and sick outside the church, because he comes up to Harry and offers him something to take the edge off. Harry gives him a sideways look, and notices he doesn’t even seem mildly upset at his cousin having been murdered. He doesn’t know how he hadn’t clocked it before, the first time, when he showed up at the church _with_ the fucking guy. Campbell looks like he finds the whole situation really amusing, or something. Like he’s deigning to be here at all.

“No thanks,” he says coldly, and Campbell shrugs like he doesn’t care either way, goes loping off in the other direction.

His headache is back with a vengeance. Mixed with the nausea roiling in his stomach, Harry feels like he can barely see straight. He needs to fix this, and there’s only one way he knows how. He doesn’t go back inside the church, doesn’t go to where he can imagine Allie staring down at Cassandra’s body with that blank, detached look in her eye once again. 

He goes home. Gets into bed. Closes his eyes.

But he can’t fucking sleep, of course he can’t. His system’s pumped full of caffeine and shock and utter confusion, his mind working overtime to try and understand the implications of all this. Either Cassandra dies the night of prom, or she dies the next day—today—so what’s the fucking point of all this? What is _he_ here for? Why does he still feel so fucking guilty about it all, and, perhaps most importantly, who the fuck is out to kill her?

He throws the covers back, goes into the master bedroom. The house is silent, everyone else gone for the day, out at the church, taking in the shock of what’s happened after such a successful prom night. He digs into the medicine cabinet in his mother’s bathroom, past the empty bottles of Xanax, past her makeup and skincare products, to the little bottle of Ambien he knows she was relying on after his dad’s funeral.

He shakes out two pills, knowing that’s probably a little over the recommended dosage for someone his size, and then runs the tap to swallow them down with water. And then goes back into his room, pulls the blinds shut all the way, gets into his bed, brings the covers up over his head so it’s completely dark.

The Ambien takes effect almost immediately. It feels strange and unnatural and induced, the drowsiness that falls over him. Like he’s being dragged underwater, unable to climb up to the surface. That works for him—he doesn’t want to. He wants to reset this, _hopes_ that he still can, that his theory is wrong or he’s still within the time frame to have it go back, or something. There’s just so little he understands about all this.

He closes his eyes and thinks about Allie’s little gold star earrings dangling like comets on either side of her face, and wishes he could have a better idea of what’s going on and what he needs to do.

He’d gone to sleep with his head killing him, and it’s still killing him when he wakes up, so that’s not a great indication of what day it is.

His room is bright, though, the blinds open, and it feels like it’s early. The pot of coffee he’d left on his desk is gone. As is the gray shirt he’d slung across the back of his chair when he’d changed for prom. But still there’s some part of him that doubts, that thinks maybe his frayed mind is losing its grip. Wouldn’t be the first time he’s thought that about himself.

With trepidation, Harry dons his robe and goes downstairs.

Toothbrush Kid is standing there at his kitchen sink, turning to give Harry a blank stare when he notices him. Harry lets out this huge exhale, presses his palm against his forehead to brace the rush of many things he feels all at once—relief because this means no one’s dead yet, anger because that was supposed to be his way _out_ , frustration because he’s not willing to pay for his exit ticket in blood money anyway, hopelessness because _is this all there is?_ Is this all his life is going to amount to, now? Living this day over and over again, or at least for as long as he can stay awake?

Toothbrush Kid takes his toothbrush out of his mouth and asks Harry, “You okay, man?”

This is the first time Harry’s ever heard him speak. So that’s new. He just nods silently, and then the kid shrugs and moves past him the same way he always does. So that’s the same.

But now Harry’s left standing there, wondering what the fuck he should do. He goes over what he knows in his head very quickly, and then realizes that the only real variable in the whole equation is _him_. Whatever he does or doesn’t do must affect whether or not Cassandra dies tonight or tomorrow, or at least when her attacker decides to go for it. If it even is the same person each time. God, there’s just so much that he doesn’t _know._

Gretchen comes into the kitchen, gives him a strange look, and asks what he’s looking for.

Harry swallows dryly and hesitates for just a second before he answers, “Coffee.”

“Good luck with that,” she scoffs, and then she breezes past him.

Harry goes upstairs. Changes into his heather gray t-shirt, the one that’s folded up neatly in his drawer, the one he’s been wearing for days now. Shows Mickey where the plunger is, puts up with his chatter. Waits for Kelly to show up.

When she does, looking shaken and frustrated, he asks her what she’s doing as she digs through his mother’s drawer, pretends not to understand when she hands him the mirror, fights it when she tells him about their parents. Tells Mickey to fuck off when he comes in looking for his shirt. Pretends like they’re still something after she reveals the messages on his mother’s computer, until she says, _”There is no us,”_ and then says she has to get out of there.

This time, when he sits outside in his hoodie, a beer in his hand that he doesn’t exactly drink, listening to Jason and Blake and the others fuck around next to his pool and joke about going to prom, he’s not quiet because he’s feeling sorry for himself or angry at the world. He’s cycling in his head just _who_ the killer could be.

From the outside, he can understand how it would look like it was him. He was loud and dickish towards Cassandra in the church, challenged her authority at nearly every turn those first few days, but...he’d gone along with her rules in the end, hadn’t he? Although maybe people would think he was bitter about that. To be fair, he is. Or he was, before all this. Enough to want to _kill_ her, though?

He also feels like nobody in town really knows him well enough to vouch for him, despite the fact that he grew up here, despite the fact that he’s known most of these people since childhood. Not even Kelly, he thinks, would back him up. He wonders if Allie would. Probably not, but she’s just about the person he feels closest to, right now. Weirdly. Even though the Allie in this loop must barely feel that way.

The only other person he can think of with an MO is Campbell. Honestly, it really seems like it was Campbell. Maybe he should be using his time in the loop to trail the guy and see what he’s up to, but...Harry supposes he’ll find out tonight, anyway, if he’s doing everything exactly the same leading up to prom.

On the pool chair next to him, Dewey asks, “Harry, are you gonna go?”

He says he doesn’t know, because that’s what he said last time, even though he fully intends to. Then he runs his tongue over his teeth, squares his jaw to prepare himself to get mad at Blake for talking shit about Kelly. That’s sort of easy. He really doesn’t like Blake.

The part that comes next, the shit about Cassandra—that’s harder. All he can picture in his head is the way she’d looked at the altar, eyes closed, blood soaked through her shirt, Allie’s broken voice above her. Maybe the guys buy how choked his voice is as anger, or something, when he spits out something about her being the problem, about things being better off—quiet, he says—if she were…

He chooses the shirt that has the stain on it. Now that he’s seen it, he has no idea how he missed it in the first place. Slicks his hair back in the same rigid way he had the first night. Walks over to prom and thinks about if he should have spent his day trying to get a gun or something to defend himself and Cassandra with, but honestly, he has zero idea where he’d be able to find one, and also thinks it would look mega fucking sus of him if people noticed.

Inside, he sits at his usual table and broods as everyone dances. Watches Will holding Kelly close, not that he feels the same sort of pain about it now, but it still is a little annoying how Will has just...whatever. It’s literally not his problem. Allie comes in after that, and he watches her too, as she gets a drink and then dances and then tries not to look bothered by Will and Kelly together, also keeps shooting these sidelong glances at Cassandra like she’s unhappy. Which she is, Harry now knows. His heart breaks for her a little, at the pain her past selves have gone through. Even if her current self either can’t remember, or never experienced it at all.

His mood, though this time born more from empathy than resentment, must show on his face, because Campbell offers him the pill. He leaves it in his pocket, and then he gets up and goes over to the bar. Makes a single gin and tonic for Allie, glances at her up and down appreciatively when she slides up next to him.

“You came,” she says, as she always does, sounding like she’s not surprised at all, but is still a little pleased nonetheless. This is where the familiarity starts to feel a little good, because now she’s here.

“So did you.”

And then he laughs—as always—when she knocks back that shot of whiskey in the highball glass, accompanied by nothing but a bracing sigh beforehand and a tiny furrow in her eyebrows after. He offers her the gin and tonic that he was never going to drink anyway, a fresh lime sitting on top of the ice, and she takes it, sniffs it delicately, and sips. Then turns away from him to face the crowd.

This is the part where he’s supposed to halfheartedly ask if she wants to dance. She’ll tell him it’s simpler in the long run if they don’t, that she’s not in the mood, and he’ll say “ _yeah, me neither_ ” and she’ll thank him for the drink and go back out there.

Or he could…

But that’s not how things are supposed to go, if he’s trying to find out who the killer is. If he does things different, they won’t show up. That’s how it goes. But then he catches the way Allie’s star earrings are dangling in the light, matching with the necklace she always wears, and then thinks about how she’d looked absolutely torn apart and angry and confused and _hurt_ , both times in the church now, and he just. Hated seeing her like that so much. God, he’d been right about her being a big distraction, but...how can he not? When he knows she’s capable of looking like she’s glowing, in that little pink dress of hers, instead of this sullen expression she’s wearing right now.

If he changes things, Cassandra dies tomorrow instead of tonight. He’s figured out that much. But if he goes to sleep tonight and resets the loop, then that never happens. No one has to die. He can try again later. So...no harm, no foul, right?

He asks, “You having a good time?” and maybe it’s a little lazy, but it worked last time.

It works this time, too.

When she’s moving against him, her arms looped around his neck, his at her waist, he thinks he’s starting to get a little too familiar with this position, also that he likes it too much every single time.

And then she asks him why he didn’t ask her to prom, and...he’s already changed things at this point, hasn’t he? So what’s the harm in changing them a little bit more? Just slightly.

“I should have,” he answers, shaking his head a little. “I wanted to.” That’s not necessarily true, at least not with the same time frame she’s thinking about. It’s true _now_ , at least. In fact, he’s already made it happen, sort of. “But this is good, too, I think.” She still smiles at him, pleased with his answer. Behind her back, Cassandra gives the two of them a double take, and he tries not to laugh. He knows there’s some version of events where she’s sort of okay with the two of them going to prom together, so. It doesn’t bother him as much.

“Yeah? Thought you could fix it by asking me to dance?”

“Maybe I just wanted to dance with you,” Harry says, and she can tell he’s teasing. She taps her fingers against the nape of his neck, and he likes how it feels a little more than he should. 

When the song changes, Allie still leans up into his ear and says, “You wanna get out of here?” and it still is so _hot_ and he still wants to say yes. Very badly. 

But also he doesn’t want to, because he’s kind of serious about not taking advantage, which is what it feels like he’d be doing. And also because he knows there’s a possibility of him driving (or walking, in this version) Allie and Cassandra home and Allie giving him the sweetest good night kiss he’s ever had, and also he thinks this Allie—the one who hasn’t looked him dead in the eye and told him she’s not fucking around—is only asking because she thinks it’s what he wants, and like, that’s not _all_ he wants. Not anymore. Not to mention the fight going on between Allie and Cassandra, and how Allie had transitioned from being forward to being sweet with him after the two sisters talked things out some, and how that makes him think her constant advances are just a tiny bit related to her acting out against Cassandra, in her own little way.

“I don’t know, I kind of like just dancing with you,” he says, and she raises her eyebrows like she’s surprised he’s not taking her up on it, and then it shifts into a smile, like she’s not unhappy with this option, either. The same way she’d reacted in his car, outside her house. He’s a little fascinated.

“I like it, too.” She draws her arms a little more securely around his neck, smiling softly. And then her expression drops a little. Behind her, Harry can see Cassandra giving the two of them a look from over Gordie’s shoulder. “Ugh. I can feel her staring at us. She is, isn’t she?”

It goes without saying who she’s referring to. “She is,” Harry says. He wants to be careful of how he talks about Cassandra now, because he doesn’t want her to get mad and storm away. That part is very important, for whatever reason. “I mean, it must seem sort of out of nowhere to her, right? She doesn’t know about us.”

Allie raises her eyebrows. “Us?”

Harry chuckles. “You know what I mean. I’m guessing you haven’t exactly told her about Fugitive?”

She sighs and tilts her head to one side like she’s tired. “No,” she admits. Then she adds, quietly, “I’m kind of mad at her right now.”

Harry nods, and then decides how to play this. He knows what she’s upset about, after all, and thinks she’s absolutely right to be mad. But also, she’s not aware of that. He thinks about the two sisters in that other loop, leaning against each other, watching that little boy’s home video. “At least you have your sister here to be mad at,” he tries.

She doesn’t automatically take it well. Draws her arms back from around his neck a little and asks, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He backtracks. He thinks about the nostalgia and sadness the two of them must have been feeling last night. “No, nothing,” he says, “just that...we have no clue what this all is, if we’re ever going to see anyone else again. My sister probably thinks I’m dead, or something.” That actually really hurts to think about, and he doesn’t have to fake it in his voice when he says it. “So you’re lucky you have someone here with you. Even if you’re mad at her. That’s all I’m saying.”

Allie’s eyes soften. “No, you’re right,” she replies, sighing. “You’re really right. Since when have you been so, like, wise?”

_Since I’ve basically had this conversation already,_ his mind says, but Harry just shrugs. “Had to realize some harsh truths lately, in this fucked up situation. Makes you think about what’s really important, you know?”

She looks slightly surprised at his answer, though she accepts it as she did last time, nodding. Then she sighs again, groans a little and looks just a tad bit guilty. Around them, people are starting to clear off, the night wrapping up, though the last song still plays over the turntable hooked up to the huge sound system. “I should probably stay and help her clean up,” she says, looking apologetic. “So she doesn’t have to do it all alone.”

“I could stick around too, if you want.”

She gives him a look. “ _You_ wanna help clean up?”

Harry brushes his thumb against her waist, just a little. This entire time, they’ve been swaying to the soft background music, standing close, her face tilted up towards his. “I kinda...don’t want this night to end,” he says, which is true on its own. Because when it does, he really has to do this right for the next iteration. Not let himself get distracted by Allie, with her gold earrings and her pink dress and her shot of whiskey. “I could walk you home afterwards?”

She looks at him with her lips parted in this little smile. “I’ll be with Cassandra,” she reminds him, and he laughs.

“Well, tell her I said that she can come, too.”

This time he means it, and he thinks Allie’s able to tell, because she ducks her head down and smiles; he can see the upward curve of her cheek. “You trying to bury the hatchet with her or something like that?”

“Something like that,” he allows. “Weren’t you the one who said I couldn’t be an asshole to your sister and then nice to you?”

She tilts her head back and laughs at that, like she thinks it’s really funny. Maybe because she thinks he’s doing this just for her. He sort of is, at this point. He’s not obligated to do anything now that things have been altered. And he likes seeing her smile.

Cassandra gives him a skeptical look when he and Allie say they’re going to stay behind to help, but accepts his offer nonetheless. Harry thinks it’s weird that she’s not acting all fakely interested in having him involved; he remembers her asking if he’d helped take inventory at the supermarket, and then her invitation to join the Committee. He guesses it’s because this time, he’s not getting involved on her terms, at her bidding, and she’s more interested in that than in the help itself. Figures. He’s definitely not going to say anything about it, though.

She also shoots Allie a sharp glance, looking pointedly (and completely unsubtly) between her and Harry, where they’re still standing close. He can guess what she’s thinking there. In this loop, she has no idea about anything going on between Allie and Harry prior to them dancing together. All she knows is that Allie’s mad at her and has hung around him—arguably her most vocal adversary other than Campbell—all night. Harry can see the rest of the dots connecting in her mind. It has to do with her, she must think. Just like everything else...but he probably should stop thinking that. It doesn’t matter that much. It’s not worth her life.

Allie sticks close to him while they clean up, flicking bits of confetti at him and threatening to throw half-finished flutes of champagne onto his suit.

“You have a stain on your shirt,” she points out as she dumps some leftover drink into a bucket that they’ll pour down the sink at the bar. “Like, right _there_.” She pokes the dark spot right in the center of his chest, to the left of the buttons. “How did I not notice it before?”

“You were too busy staring somewhere else,” he smirks, and she actually hits him on the arm.

They’re being kind of flirty and obvious right in front of Cassandra, who’s starting to look less sour about it and more...curious, as Harry watches her observe them in his periphery. Like she’s surprised that they actually get along well. He tries not to pay her any mind, though, which he can tell is what Allie’s aiming for as well. She’s focused all her attention on him and like, they _are_ cleaning, but she’s also flirting with him and distracting him, laughing as she wheels a garbage can into his knees and snatches bottles from his hands to toss into the bin.

“Why don’t you guys go deal with the music equipment? I’ve got the rest of the trash,” Cassandra says after a while, and Harry can tell they’re annoying her. Allie gives him a look with her lips pressed into a line, like she’s trying to stop herself from laughing so she doesn’t annoy Cassandra more.

“I think we made her mad,” she whispers conspiratorially from behind the speakers when they get up on stage and begin unplugging everything.

“By talking?” Harry says with his eyebrows raised. Allie giggles.

“At least she’s not all alone. Imagine how long this’d take her.”

It’s true. They’re almost done now, with most everything cleared away, the dance floor swept up, all the chairs pushed in, all the drink bottles collected up into black bags that’ll go into the dumpster. Allie begins winding up some of the cords from the equipment they’ve unplugged while Harry wheels the turntable and hauls Bean’s boxes of vinyls offstage, to a little storage corner that has a bunch of other unused stuff.

He and Allie have to wheel the big speaker off to the side together, and when they’re pushing it towards the closed off storage area behind the stage facade, he says, “Let me ask you something.” She raises her eyebrows at him expectantly in lieu of response. He continues, “What are you gonna tell Cassandra?”

He doesn’t have to clarify that he’s talking about when Cassandra inevitably asks about _them_. She rolls her eyes a little. “The truth, I guess?”

“Which is…?”

“That you asked me to dance, and I said yes? And that my night wasn’t so shitty because of you, and that I like hanging out with you?”

“You do, huh?” He doesn’t try to hide how smug he sounds about it, also the fact that her night wasn’t so shitty, in her words, because of _him._ That feels good to hear, he won’t even lie.

She makes a face at him. “Shut up.”

When they set the speaker to park away from the rest of the banquet and dance area, Allie steps a little closer to him. He almost automatically reaches out to put his hands around her waist, just like he always does whenever they dance, but he holds himself still as she blinks up at him, her eyelashes casting these long shadows over her cheeks in the overhead lighting filtered through all the fake stars hanging from the ceiling. 

She says, “Let me ask _you_ something, now.”

“Shoot.”

She steps even closer still. Her back is to the rest of the hall, and they’re partially obscured by the stage backdrop. Her hair has lost some of its curl throughout the night, but it looks just as good like this, falling in these natural waves over her shoulders as she tilts her chin towards him with purpose. “Am I gonna have to wait until the very end of the night for you to kiss me?”

He lets out this breath, an amused exhale, as she stands in front of him all headstrong and grounded, like she’s daring him to prove her wrong. He likes this—when Allie just says what she wants, what she’s feeling. He’s thought it before and he’ll think it again.

He _was_ going to wait, maybe try to recreate that perfectly sweet little kiss from the other time, her hand all soft against his jaw, her lips tasting like limes and gin. But he doesn’t have to. He bets she still tastes like limes and gin right now.

Harry’s about to open his mouth, give her some kind of fitting response ( _”Getting impatient, I see.”_ ) in a low voice that he knows girls like, knows _Allie_ likes, then maybe tug her into him, pull them a little further into the shadows so they go from partially to fully obscured behind the stage facade. He wets his bottom lip and her eyes drop there, but then—in the very corner of his periphery, he sees Cassandra gather up the last of the trash bags and start to haul it out to the door of the hall, and— _shit_.

His stomach drops suddenly, plummets down as this mild panic starts to well up in him, because even though he’s changed things, he still doesn’t love the idea of her going outside, alone. Would rather do it himself, with that knife from behind the bar and his phone flashlight on, just like last time. That’s what he was going to do in the first place, but then Allie had to go and distract him with her pretty hair and pretty face and tempting words. She must be confused when Harry suddenly steps away from her, out to the dance floor area across from the doors and calls out, “Wait, I can take those if you want—”

But Cassandra’s already through the door. Harry curses under his breath. Allie comes up next to him, puzzled, asks what he’s doing, but he has a hard time paying attention because it suddenly is clear to him that something is, once again, not right. The feeling in his stomach is back, twisting into knots that spur him into action. He moves across the floor to follow Cassandra out the door.

Allie’s calling his name, but it’s like some kind of force is drawing him out there—maybe it’s the panic starting to bubble up his stomach, maybe it’s leftover regret from seeing her body in the church the other day, maybe it’s something else entirely, but he just feels like he needs to be outside.

It’s nothing, he tells himself as he makes short work of the distance between the stage and the door, following Cassandra out there. It’s nothing and there will be nothing; she’ll toss the trash into the dumpster and get spooked out by some noise in the trees that turns out to be the wind or whatever, and then she’ll go back inside. Just like she did that other time; he witnessed it with his own eyes.

He’s just confirming that, that’s all. It’s fine if she thinks he’s a weirdo for following her outside, it won’t matter by the time it’s morning anyway.

Harry almost sighs in relief when he gets outside and he sees her standing there on the sidewalk, facing the direction where she’d looked last time she got scared by the wind through the leaves.

“Hey, Cassandra, are you—”

He means to ask whether she’s all good to head home because they’re also finished up inside, but she turns sharply, startled by his voice, looks at him like she’s seen a ghost or something, then quickly faces forward again. In a matter of split-seconds, Harry realizes why, as soon as he moves forward to get a little closer to her.

There’s something standing directly in front of her, someone Harry hadn’t been able to see until he moved a little to the side. 

Holding a gun pointed right at Cassandra. 

At first, he can’t even tell who it is, face too obscured and unremarkable in the shadows. But then he realizes there’s something familiar about the guy: he’s lanky and his face is sharp, his skin pale and thrown into relief against the shadows cast from the streetlight above. It’s Dewey—the quiet kid Harry never paid attention to but now shares a house with. 

_This_ is the killer? This random kid who’s basically nobody?

As soon as Harry connects the dots, a number of things happen very quickly all at once.

One: he steps toward Cassandra, wanting instinctively to do _something,_ anything, also feeling so fucking _stupid_ for not thinking that this might happen tonight. And he tries to say, “What the fuck is going on?” but only gets the first three or four words out.

Two: Allie steps out from the prom venue, out onto the sidewalk, spots Harry and Cassandra but likely can’t see Dewey yet, begins to say, “Harry, what are you doing—?” but is cut off.

Three: a gunshot rings out through the night, loud and sudden and snapping against his eardrums and Cassandra jolts a little like she’s been electrocuted, then brings her hand to press against her stomach. Where she’s been shot.

Harry hears Allie scream and then she rushes over, next to Cassandra, but he’s still staring at _Dewey_ , trying to wrap his head around the situation. Cassandra’s still upright, and she hasn’t said anything, but her face is white and her hands are still pressed against the gunshot wound in her stomach.

“You _shot_ my sister,” Allie is saying uncomprehendingly, at Cassandra’s side. “Why did you do that?!”

Dewey is starting to look a little panicked now that it’s abundantly clear that he wasn’t as alone with Cassandra as he’d thought. He also still has the gun pointed, now at all three of them.

“Dewey,” Harry says slowly, raising his hands up in front of him, palms facing outward. “Put the gun down.”

Dewey turns so the gun’s facing him. “No one was supposed to be here,” he says, like he’s angry about it. “No one else was supposed to see.”

Harry’s not, like, a fucking negotiator or anything, doesn’t know anything about handling these types of situations outside of whatever he’s seen on TV or whatever. But he repeats, trying to make his voice calm, trying to de-escalate. He doesn’t know how well it works. “Put the gun down, man.” 

Next to him, Allie is silent, petrified, staring at Dewey, with one arm wrapped around Cassandra who seems just as frozen, despite blood now seeping from between her fingers.

“ _You_ said she was the problem,” Dewey says harshly, shaking the gun at Harry. Harry has no fucking idea what he’s talking about. “I’m getting you your peace and quiet. Just like you wanted.”

Allie whips her head around to look at him; in his periphery, he can see her eyes are wide, confused, full of pain and fear and questions. He doesn’t have any answers, hasn’t left his brain any capacity to really process Dewey’s words, too focused on the barrel of the gun pointing him down.

Dewey has a manic look in his eye now, though, and Harry’s about to try and—he doesn’t know, reason with him? Anything to just get him to put the fucking gun down, but then he gets this determined expression on his mousey face, like he’s too in it to quit at this point, especially after he’s already fucking shot someone. He turns the gun back towards Cassandra and doesn’t hesitate.

“Jesus!” Harry says as another shot rings out, and Cassandra finally collapses.

“Least I could get is a thank you,” Dewey mutters darkly. Then when Harry doesn’t do anything except stare at him, frozen, unable to move, his face shifts into something else, something ugly.

And then there’s another crack of a gunshot, followed by a sudden, searing pain in his own chest, and he’s down on the ground, feeling like he’s drowning as his lungs fill with blood, and all he can see is the sidewalk because Cassandra’s on the other side of him.

A fourth shot, and then Allie’s down, too, next to him, dark red spreading all over the center of her shimmery pink dress, the life already gone from her eyes before she hits the ground.

And then there are footsteps running away, retreating into the night.

The world starts to go fuzzy and indistinct around the edges. Distantly, he’s aware of something wet seeping onto his fingers that are resting against the pavement. Blood—his or Allie’s or even Cassandra’s, he doesn’t know.

Whatever part of his brain that is still capable of higher functioning realizes that this is likely the worst possible outcome of this entire thing. Not much to do about it now, though, as he lays dying on the ground, Allie and Cassandra both dead around him.

At the very least, he thinks as he slips away, he’s done now. 

No more living in circles with no beginnings and no ends. It can be over.

His head is killing him.

At first he thinks this must be the afterlife or something, and is hugely disappointed to discover that petty physical hurts don’t go away after you die.

And then he realizes it’s his head, always his fucking head, that aches and not his chest, not where there’d been a bullet hole just two seconds ago. He opens his eyes, and—it’s too early, the room is too bright, he’s in his fucking bed again and he feels perfectly normal other than the dull ache behind his eyes, no wound in his chest, no blood in his lungs.

Then the rest of the night comes back to him, all at once, and it _feels_ like his chest is caving in even though he has a hand there and it’s whole and fine, but something roils in his stomach and—he has to shoot up out of bed in a sudden, jerky movement. The vertigo does nothing to help with the massive wave of nausea as he stumbles into the bathroom and kneels over the toilet, is violently sick with burning, bitter bile that rises up in his throat, his stomach absent of anything else. He can’t remember the last time he had something to eat.

What he can remember, though, is what Dewey had said. _”You said she was the problem. I’m getting you your peace and quiet. Just like you wanted.”_

Dewey kills Cassandra because of what _he_ said. About Cassandra being the problem, about wanting her gone so he could have quiet. And of course he didn’t mean it, not this time—not even the first time he said it, although he hadn’t known that then. But he never in a million years thought that somebody would actually take him up on it. Shoot someone, because of some stupid, drunken, anger-fueled comment. He feels sick all over again.

And _Allie_ , oh God, Allie—he’d gotten her killed too. Although he has a feeling that hasn’t quite taken, if he’s alive now, but still. He never meant for any of this to happen. Not her dying, not Cassandra getting shot, not _himself_ getting shot.

When he finds the strength to stand again, Harry rinses his mouth out in the sink to wash away the taste of raw stomach acid. Then he stands with his hands braced on either side of the bathroom counter, staring at the water from the still running tap swirl in the basin and down the drain, thinking hard.

The guilt makes sense now. The twisting in his stomach, the feeling like it’s his fucking fault…because it _is_. He ran his mouth and said shit he hadn’t actually meant and—yeah, how could he have known that Dewey was secretly a fucking murderer who would take him seriously?

But the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes it doesn’t make sense.

Dewey’s the one who kills Cassandra. That much is abundantly clear. And according to Dewey himself, it’s because of what Harry said.

But that doesn’t account, Harry realizes, for the day where Cassandra dies in the morning, the day after prom. And that time he hadn’t even gone to the pool with the other guys, hadn’t seen or interacted with Dewey all day. So what the fuck is going on?

Harry makes another quick plan, and yeah, all his fucking plans so far have been massive flops, but. Fuck him for trying, right? What else is he supposed to do?

He dresses and goes downstairs. Toothbrush Kid and Gretchen are already gone by now, he’s stayed too long inside his room, but the state of the kitchen is innately familiar to him now. The stack of dishes, the shit sprawled everywhere over the counter, notebooks and laptops and wires and phones and shit.

He goes back up to his room. Waits for Kelly to show up, plays along when she does. Waits again all day, because the passage of time feels like nothing to him now, until he hears voices out in the backyard, by the pool. It’s dark outside and the usual group is gathered around on the chairs, but Harry doesn’t join them, doesn’t say anything to anyone.

He doesn’t dress for prom either, but when the night is almost up, he gets up and leaves his room, leaves his house. There are still a few guys hanging around by the pool, Blake and Dewey and some other people he doesn’t know, and he thinks about going over there and—doing what? He doesn’t know. Dewey technically hasn’t killed anyone yet, but even if he had, what would Harry do? What _could_ Harry do?

He bypasses them, goes out the front door rather than through the back, starts walking over to the prom venue, dressed in his gray t-shirt and hoodie and sweatpants. He saw Dewey at his house, and he didn’t join the others by the pool, but…he just has to make sure. Again.

A few other people are out on the streets, walking home, but they pay him no mind. He keeps his head down and it’s just a ten or fifteen minute walk.

He sees Allie, suddenly, walking towards him from the prom venue. She’s alone and must be heading home for the night, he realizes. Because she doesn’t stay behind in this timeline to help Cassandra. She has a bad time at prom and is in a fight with her, and Harry wasn’t there to dance with her either and she has this sullen look on her face, her arms crossed in front of her, until she spots Harry and calls out, “Look who decided to show up.”

He laughs a little, wets his lips, tries to act normal as she comes to a stop in front of him. Tries really hard not to think about the last time he saw her, dead on the ground next to him, blood all over her soft pink dress. “Just taking a walk, actually.”

She hums, then says, “I don’t blame you for not going. It was pretty stupid, anyway.”

Some part of him feels something like regret, because now Allie’s gone and had a bad night, when he knows she’s fully capable of enjoying herself at prom. When she’s with _him_. But he has to play it normal. “If it was so stupid, then why’d you go?”

She sighs. Her earrings catch in the light, and even now, when she’s looking sad and tired, he still thinks she looks just stunning. He’ll always think that, every time. “I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have.”

Because he just can’t help himself, Harry tells her, “At least you were the best looking person in the room. Since I wasn’t there.”

She fucking _snorts_ , and it’s cute and he just can’t stop doing this, can he? Getting distracted by Allie. Then she wets her lips and blinks at him and his compliment. Tucks some hair behind her ear, and then says, “Is this you trying to tell me you like my dress or something? Because you should have seen Gwen. And Elle, oh my God.”

“The dress is nice, too,” he says, because the dress is really just part of the whole picture; the main part of it is her. She gives him this pleased little smile.

“Maybe we should have gone together,” she says, leaning in and whispering it like it’s some kind of silly secret. “Knocked the whole party dead on their feet.”

“Maybe we should have,” he echoes softly, with the knowledge that she’d sort of wanted that in the first place, from yesterday. She looks like she’s imagining it, too, by the way her lips curve, her eyes soft and twinkling.

God. She looks so alive, looking all wistful under the moonlight. He never wants what happened yesterday to happen ever again.

He puts his hands in his pockets and she seems to be done with imagining this other reality where they go to prom together (Harry doesn’t have to just imagine, which makes it even harder—he knows how it goes. Knows how she kisses him, dances with him, tells him she had a good time). Her eyes and her smile fades and then she’s just back to looking kind of down, like her whole night’s been a waste.

“I should get going,” she says, face falling. He nods, bids her good night, and lets her pass him on the road, watching her go for a little. She looks over her shoulder at him once, gives him this little wave, then continues on in the direction of her house.

As soon as she’s gone, he feels like a huge piece of shit.

It’s his fault her sister dies. It’s his fault she looks like that up at the church, her voice cracking, falling apart in front of the entire town. It’s his fault she’s lying dead on the ground, blonde hair splayed all across the pavement, the last thing he sees before the darkness takes him, too.

But it still just doesn’t make _sense_.

He continues on to the prom venue; the last of the attendees are filtering out, he thinks, and he can’t hear music playing from inside anymore which tells him that things are wrapped up. There’s Dewey or anyone else in the bushes or around the corner when he checks. He stays in the same spot he had that other time he did this, waits, and then watches from over the ledge as, eventually, Cassandra comes outside to throw the last trash bag into the dumpster, then go back inside, then come back out again and walk home. Alone and alive.

But it’s not over.

He goes back home, sees Mickey and the others—who he now recognizes is a totally different group of people than the usual guys—hanging out by the pool, ignores their invitation to hang. Only goes inside briefly to grab his keys from his room before he heads to the garage, gets into his car, the Maserati, and takes it out into the night.

Then he drives, drives to the edge of town, to where the road ends, then turns around and does the same thing across to the other side, around the entire perimeter of the whole place, boxed in on every side by dense forest that’s impossible to see through at this time of night, rising up all around them like this unseen, looming trap that only becomes clear once you get to the border. He drives until the sun starts to rise, listens to the static from the radio of his car before he remembers he can pair it with his phone and the scant few songs that are saved there, switches between that and silence and static for hours.

It’s something to do. And driving forces him to be alert behind the wheel, although he hasn’t felt the need to go to sleep. But once the sky starts getting light, with soft blues and yellows rising up from over the trees that surround everything everywhere, he goes back into town. Cuts the gas and creeps along the road, coasting, driving on the road that feeds into Allie’s neighborhood. It’s supposed to happen only a couple blocks from her house. He rolls down the window, squinting out into the street and…there’s someone there, leaning against the fence outside one of the empty houses. The figure is pretty far away, but it’s undeniably Dewey; skinny, red hair, holding—Harry can just barely make it out—a gun loosely by his side. Looking fucking cavalier about it all.

This doesn’t necessarily surprise him, but it’s valuable information: Dewey’s the one who kills her, both times. Both days. So he has that, but he still doesn’t have the main thing he’s after. The _why_ —if he kills her on prom night because of what Harry said, then why does he do it today?

He could get out of the car right now, go over there and confront him. Harry considers it, just for a second, his grip tightening on the wheel imagining what might go down. He feels like he could probably take Greg Dewey in a fight, but the guy’s got a fucking gun, and isn’t above shooting Harry, which he inexorably knows.

The guilt is back when he does it, but Harry slowly, quietly, puts the car back into drive and rolls along the street, turns the next corner so he’s not visibly from Dewey’s vantage point anymore, drives back to his house. There are people strewn fucking everywhere—on the couch, on the floor in sleeping bags. This is way more than nineteen people, and Harry’s kind of really annoyed that his place is being treated like some kind of free post-prom crash pad.

That doesn’t matter. He goes upstairs, to the room Dewey’s sharing with a few other people. Doesn’t care when he slams the door open, startling some of them awake, a few random guys he barely knows plus Blake, yells at them to get the fuck up and get the fuck out.

“The fuck’s going on?” Blake blinks, but Harry cuts him a scathing look and repeats, loudly, forcefully, for them all to get the fuck out.

They listen this time, scurrying from the room that, at this time, is bright as hell because it’s east-facing and has this panel of three windows against the wall, with the curtains pulled back. He shuts the door behind him and starts turning the place over, upending random duffel bags and backpacks, cursing at all the _shit_ that’s in here. This was a guest room before, so all the dressers were empty, but they’re full now of people’s clothes and shit, and he rummages through them with little care, tossing out shirts and socks and underwear on the floor in search of something—anything.

He finds it pushed underneath the gap between one of the dressers and the floor, an unremarkable shoebox that rattles suspiciously when he knocks against it with his hand. He draws it out, rips the lid off. Inside there’s a whole fucking box of bullets, and Harry doesn’t know the first thing about guns or weapons or anything, but they look small enough to fit into the gun Dewey had been holding this morning. The same one that had pointed him down the previous evening. Maybe one of these bullets in this box is the one that had embedded into his chest, or Cassandra’s, or Allie’s.

He tosses the entire shoebox onto the bed like it’s burned him, runs his hands through his hair, trying to take deep breaths. If his mother’s cabinet had any Xanax remaining, he’d be reaching for it right now. But he’s not done, he’s not done…he gets back on the ground, crouches so he can shine his phone flashlight under the dresser to see if there’s anything else. Because the shoebox where Dewey keeps his gun and his spare bullets isn’t enough, not for him.

The light from his phone catches on something else, a marble-covered notebook knocked slightly askew from when he’d taken the shoebox out. It must have been resting underneath the box; Harry grabs at it, drags it out and into the light, then turns his phone flashlight off. It’s not dusty or anything, despite having been taken from underneath the dresser; the spine looks bent and the corners are worn.

The first couple pages are leftover from school notes, and distantly, Harry realizes they were in the same English class. He skips over those, though, quickly flipping through until he gets to some blank pages that, behind them, have several more bits of writing. With dates on the very first line, and then sort of diary entries written directly below, starting from the day they got here, with Dewey’s notes jotted down.

Harry scans through them quickly, skips past the first couple days, where Dewey’s just written basic shit like _”everyone’s gone, like everyone, we’re the only ones here and no one knows why”_ and _”people are starting to think we’ve been kidnapped”_. He reads on to when Cassandra had gathered them all in the church, and Dewey was not happy with that. Had a lot of choice words written down there that Harry really doesn’t like, despite having said some of them before, but from there it only gets…more disturbing, as he continues flipping through the pages. The entries become less of a day-to-day log, turning more into a repository for what Harry now realizes is a sick, deranged mind.

The whole way Dewey talks about women is—he feels a little sick just reading it. And it’s not just Cassandra, though she’s one of his main subjects of interests. Kelly’s in there too, and Helena, and Allie, and Gwen, Becca, Bean, anyone who’s spoken up or offered input on anything in town. The entries only get worse, violent and dark and…yeah, he doesn’t think he can read any more of this.

He flips to the very last page of the notebook just for good measure, though, and then right there next to the back cover is a list of names. Clear as day, printed neatly, going down the page. Cassandra’s name is at the very top, followed by Allie, then Kelly, then Helena…the list goes on. Next to Cassandra and Allie’s names are some dates, too; the one by Cassandra’s is today.

Harry realizes, in a sudden moment of sick clarity, that it’s a fucking hit list. That Dewey had been _planning_ this shit all along—not just Cassandra, but a lot of the girls in town. The date next to Allie’s name is a month from now, and Harry stares at the ink on the page like his gaze, the pure weight of just how floored he is, will make it disappear.

The ink doesn’t go anywhere.

Dewey kills Cassandra on prom night, a day early, because he thinks he’s doing Harry some kind of favor. That’s still his fault. It’s happened more than twice now, he realizes—that very first loop, when he did everything the same. Still said all the shit he said by the pool. Cassandra was probably already dead by the time he went to sleep that night.

But Dewey kills Cassandra today because he’d been planning to all along. Because he’s fucking sick in the head, as evidenced by all the vile shit he’s written in this creepy notebook that Harry abruptly drops onto the bed, like he can’t stand to hold it any longer.

Someone bangs on the door, complaining about having been kicked out, asking what Harry’s doing. He barely registers it, just knows he can’t fucking be in here right now, in this room where someone like Dewey— _Dewey_ , the short, pale kid no one talked to—slept and wrote and planned out whatever he’s planned out.

He throws the door open, the shoebox and notebook still on the bed, is fully prepared to stalk past the small crowd gathered outside the door and retreat to his bedroom, but then there are several buzzes and pings as multiple people at once get notifications on their phone.

Harry already knows what it’s going to say before people check, even though the message comes earlier that it had been last time.

She’s dead. Gordie had found her, while going out the door to bring her a cup of coffee that she forgot to take along with her. Harry dimly thinks that maybe it happened this way because, in this timeline, Allie’s still mad at Cassandra by this time. Would have no reason to head towards the Committee chambers to go and find her.

No one bothers going back inside the bedroom then, and there’s this huge fucking commotion as people start to poke their heads out from all corners of the house, followed by a mass exodus to the church, where they’ve been summoned.

Where Allie can stand at the podium, tear-stained and drained, and demand to know who did this. Who shot her sister and why did they do that.

Harry can’t fucking see that again.

He’s gotten his answers. Paid for them in blood this time, too. He needs this to be over. 

He goes to his room while everyone else leaves the house, rushes down to the church until the whole place is empty and quiet in a way that feels eerie. Thinks about taking some more Ambien, but just lies down in his bed instead, and stares at the ceiling. Some more text messages are coming through to his phone, probably updates on the situation and reactions from people. He doesn’t check. Just stares at the ceiling and thinks and thinks and thinks, until his eyes are blurry and his mind is incapable of housing any more thoughts, until he’s finally able to let his eyes slide shut and let this day melt away into nothing.

Like it never happened. 

(Except that it _did_ , his mind offers as a very last thought before he slips into unconsciousness. It did, to him, and while everything else may be the same all over again when he wakes, he’s not the same. Not at all.)

It takes a long, long time for Harry to figure out that if he tries to intervene, there’s no version of events that ends the way he wants them to.

He wakes the next day with a headache that, at this point, feels like a part of him just as much as his limbs or any other body part. He’s used to it, barely pays it mind. Decides to do everything the same as he did the loop before—skips prom entirely, doesn’t even bother leaving the house until it’s already over, drives around—only this time he confronts Dewey, leaned against the fence outside one of the houses in the Pressmans’ neighborhood.

That ends with Dewey killing him, shooting him in the side and then running away, down the street and into the Pressman house where Harry hears more gunshots and some screaming as he bleeds out on the grass. So that’s no good.

The next day, he tries the same thing again, only he chooses to make himself known as soon as Cassandra’s in sight as Dewey lies in wait for her, thinking maybe if he does things slightly differently, this’ll work.

It doesn’t work. It ends with Cassandra facedown on the road, dead from just a single shot this time, before Dewey’s turning the gun on him and firing.

He tries bringing a weapon, an old tire iron he finds in his garage, but that ends even worse, with this squabble and confusion between the three of them when Dewey, in shock, fires the gun after Harry comes up behind him and canes him across the back of his head, but not hard enough to knock him out, apparently. Cassandra collapses and Harry’s left trying to fight off Dewey, and then fucking Allie comes rushing down the street, out her of her house, attracted by the noise. She screams at the sight of Cassandra, and her appearance is enough to distract Harry into letting Dewey get the upper hand, and then he shoots both Allie and Harry.

So that’s a fucking no-go, too.

He tries recreating the exact night of prom again, the words about Cassandra tasting ashy and fake in his mouth. Even goes to the event, does everything the exact same, doesn’t dance with Allie, takes Campbell’s pill. He ends up dead before even Cassandra in that one, wakes up back at the beginning with his headache and can barely remember what happened at all. So no more pills, he decides.

He skips going to prom as well, lies in wait for Dewey outside the building, because the guy must have been in hiding beforehand, right? Waiting for Cassandra to come and step out, alone?

He ends up shooting Harry in fucking shock at his appearance, trigger-happy and unhinged, Harry realizes as he slumps against the pavement. Several prom-goers are drawn outside by the noise, Cassandra among them, and then Dewey takes that opportunity to shoot her, too, before firing indiscriminately into the crowd. He thinks he sees Allie collapse before he loses consciousness.

Several more iterations of that where he does things just slightly different, but it always ends the fucking same, no matter if he says what he says by the pool or if he waits until the next morning to intercept Dewey. Allie keeps fucking being drawn into it, too, which…he’s getting fucking sick of seeing her be collateral damage to his inability to make things right. Cassandra, too, but with Allie…she’s not even supposed to be fucking involved in this. She keeps showing up by mistake, because he either can’t stay away from her (there’s one version where he gets her to dance with him again, just because he’s feeling hopeless about everything and is desperate for some levity, that ends with her dying before either Harry or Cassandra have even been shot) or because she inserts herself in, attracted by the noise or by Harry or Cassandra or whatever.

There’s exactly one time where, outside the prom venue—in this version, Harry’s taking Allie to prom, and they’re helping Cassandra clean up and Harry’s preemptively offered to take the garbage out—he manages to wrestle the gun away from Dewey, but only after Cassandra’s been shot once. She’s still alive, but is prone on the sidewalk, her breathing shallow and labored and he’s got the gun in his hand, is pointing it right at Dewey, whose face looks caught-out and shocked, like he didn’t think that this might happen. That _he_ would be on the other end of the barrel, and Harry thinks this might actually be the one where things get fixed, despite Cassandra’s quiet gasps for breath from below.

Dewey’s like, fucking blubbering, saying all these pathetic things, a complete 180 from his usual sneering, twisted self now that the power dynamic’s been swapped. But Harry can barely hear anything Dewey’s saying, because all he can think about is the weight of the gun in his hand, the feeling of the trigger, curved to fit into the crook of his index finger, _made_ to be pushed down and fired, the bullet’s trajectory aiming right into Dewey’s head.

His hand shakes and Cassandra’s breath shakes and Dewey shakes, but Harry…he can’t fucking do it. He _can’t fucking do it_. It becomes vividly clear to him that he’s not a killer, he can’t _do it_. Not even to someone like Dewey, who’s killed time and time again, who’s killed _him_ time and time again, who has these shockingly evil thoughts hidden away in that marble notebook under the dresser. Harry honestly thinks that the entire town would be better off if Dewey were dead, too, but still he can’t do it. He’s not a killer.

He can’t let Dewey know that, though, and he squares his jaw, prepared to make some kind of threat to cow him into submission without having to shoot him. But at that very second, Allie comes rushing out of the prom venue. And the sight of her is always, always distracting, even when this time her face contorts into shock and then fear and then pain as she takes in the scene before her: Harry holding a gun up to the quietly cowering Greg Dewey, and Cassandra bleeding out on the ground.

It’s enough to weaken Harry’s guard for just a second; he lowers his arm and then Dewey rushes him, gets the gun back, and then the whole thing ends with the three of them on the ground again. Him, Allie, and Cassandra, into whom Dewey fires another shot for good measure when he sees her still breathing.

Allie’s not totally gone yet, and she’s within his line of vision as he lays on his side, half of his body on the pavement, half on the grass. She can’t speak, he thinks, but she’s facing him with an uncomprehending look in her eye. He can’t even imagine how confused she must be, to have her last moments of life taken away from her with no understanding as to why or how things have unfolded like this.

At this point, he can’t recall a version of events where he hasn’t ended up this way. Because if he intervenes, Dewey unequivocally kills him as well, unwilling to leave any witnesses alive. And he hasn’t tried _not_ intervening because…God, isn’t this what he’s supposed to do? Something, anything, to stop all this?

It’s starting to feel fucking pointless, though, as he watches the life drain from Allie’s eyes, watches her shallow breaths eventually peter out, watches her body grow still in the grass. Nothing is working.

He can barely feel the gunshot wound in his stomach, pressed against the sidewalk, seeping into the dirt and the pavement. He closes his eyes and wonders if it would be easier to go to sleep or to just let go and die, to reset everything once again. He wonders if, at this point, there’s even a difference between the two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope everyone's doing well, thanks for reading! 💛

**Author's Note:**

> have i technically already written time loop for hallie, sort of? yes. am i doing it again? also yes.
> 
> plus i've decreed that canon now belongs to me since netflix abandoned it so there
> 
> [tumblr](https://new-ham.tumblr.com/) / [twitter](https://twitter.com/ailiepressman)


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